Monthly Archives: November 2016

  • Nocturnal Animals

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Tom Ford (2016)

    In Austin Wright’s Tony and Susan, first published in 1993, Tony is the protagonist of a soon to be published novel-within-the-novel.  Susan is the reader of the manuscript of the novel.  She’s surprised to receive this from the author, her ex-husband Edward, with whom she’s not had contact in years.  Dedicated to Susan, Edward’s novel is called ‘Nocturnal Animals’:  she’s always been an insomniac – during their brief marriage, Edward called her a ‘nocturnal animal’ – and she reads the manuscript at night.  Tom Ford, as well as directing, wrote the screenplay for his film of Wright’s book.  Ford retains the basic scheme of the original but his decision to give the movie the name of Edward’s novel is significant.  It draws attention to an inherent challenge in turning this piece of literature into cinema – even if unintentionally (Ford may have thought Nocturnal Animals was simply a catchier title than Tony and Susan).  While the film can retain formal parity between Wright’s two narratives, Edward’s shocking crime story will, on screen, tend to be more exciting than watching Susan read the story – and Ford eschews the use of internal monologue to tell us what she’s thinking as she reads.  One of the interesting features of Nocturnal Animals is that the Tony part doesn’t, in the event, eclipse the Susan part.  This too may be the result of things Tom Ford didn’t quite intend.

    In Edward’s story, Tony Hastings (Jake Gyllenhaal), his wife Laura (Isla Fisher) and teenage daughter India (Ellie Bamber) drive through West Texas at night.  They’re en route to their holiday home for a few days.  The family’s car is forced off the road by nocturnal animals in the form of three redneck hoodlums (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Robert Aramayo and Karl Glusman).  Powerless to stop two of these men from abducting Laura and India, Tony is forced by the third to drive to a patch of abandoned land, where Tony himself is abandoned.  Next morning, he manages to find a farmhouse, from where he contacts the police.  Bobby Andes (Michael Shannon), the detective assigned to the case, discovers the dead bodies of Tony’s wife and daughter, both of whom were raped before being murdered.  A year later, Andes contacts the guilt-wracked Tony:  one of the three men suspected of the crimes has been shot dead while committing a bank robbery and Andes asks Tony to identify another of the men, who is now in custody.  The bereaved husband and father then joins forces with the detective, who reveals that he is terminally ill, to bring the one culprit still at large to extra-legal justice.  The finale is a gruesome confrontation between this man, Ray Marcus (Taylor-Johnson), and the formerly mild-mannered Tony.  Neither of them gets out of the story alive.

    Susan (Amy Adams) is wealthy but troubled – in her work running a fashionable Los Angeles art gallery, in her second marriage – to a financier called Hutton Morrow (Armie Hammer).  He’s out of town – and playing away from home – throughout Susan’s sleepless nights reading the manuscript.   She’s gripped and shaken by ‘Nocturnal Animals’, largely because of what she perceives as its resonances with her youthful relationship with Edward, which Tom Ford describes in flashbacks.   Tony’s loss of his wife and daughter reminds Susan that she was unfaithful to Edward with Hutton, and had an abortion when she was pregnant with her first husband’s child.  It seems her marriage to Edward was in trouble even before then because he felt she didn’t sufficiently encourage his writing.  ‘I think you should write about something other than yourself,’ she ventures. ‘Everybody writes about themselves,’ is the touchy reply.  This exchange is evidently still in Susan’s mind some fifteen years later:  as she reads ‘Nocturnal Animals’, her mind’s eye sees Tony as Edward.  This isn’t the only reason why Tom Ford has Edward, in the flashbacks, as well as Tony, in the novel-within-the-film, played by Jake Gyllenhaal.  Perhaps anxious about the limited dramatic scope of the Susan material, Ford seems to think the presence of the same actor in both the movie’s halves will somehow equalise their dramatic charge.  Thirty-five-year-old Gyllenhaal is physically convincing as twenty-something Edward and forty-something Tony but the dual casting turns out to be problematic – because of the particular themes of Nocturnal Animals and because of Tom Ford’s shortcomings as a film-maker.

    Many people who regularly read novels and see movies struggle, if they read a novel after watching the film adaptation of it, to rid the novelist’s creation of the actor who has incarnated it on screen.  Familiarity with this syndrome gives the viewer of Nocturnal Animals a kind of sympathy with Susan, for all that her situation as a reader is so different and individual; but it also raises questions about the logic of her visualisation of Edward’s story.   If Tony is inescapably Edward, who are the sources of the other people Susan sees in ‘Nocturnal Animals’?  In particular, doesn’t she see herself as Laura or her daughter Samantha as India?  At one point, Ford has Susan make an anxious phone call to Samantha (India Menuez).   Because this sequence is oddly disconnected and Armie Hammer’s Hutton looks too young to have fathered a girl now in her late teens, I wasn’t sure if Samantha was Susan’s fantasy of the daughter she’d have today if she’d not had the abortion years ago.  Even if Samantha is a fantasy, however, the above question still applies.

    Susan gets a paper cut removing Edward’s manuscript from its envelope.  The cut is an effective foreshadowing of the lacerating force of his novel:  by the time she’s finished it, Susan is convinced that ‘Nocturnal Animals’ not only is the tale of Tony Hastings’s revenge on the forces that destroyed his family but also serves as Edward’s revenge on her (and that this is why she’s the book’s dedicatee).  Tom Ford’s dramatisation of ‘Nocturnal Animals’ doesn’t, however, live up to this billing.  It has the quality of an accomplished but orderly pastiche of Southern Gothic.  It lacks the motive force and crazy momentum needed to make us feel, as well as understand, the powerful effect that Edward’s prose is having on his ex-wife.  ‘Nocturnal Animals’ takes a long time to come to life.  When it does so, this is thanks to Michael Shannon, whose dying lawman is more vivid – and more real – than almost anything else in the film.  Shannon, strikingly slim as Elvis Presley in Elvis & Nixon earlier this year, is alarmingly lean here.  His ambiguous, unnerving presence makes Detective Andes hard to read but somehow threatening.   The actor’s loss of weight makes it all the more convincing that Andes turns out to be nearing death, and careless of how justice is done.

    The trouble is that Michael Shannon upstages Jake Gyllenhaal, which seriously upsets the scheme of Nocturnal Animals.  Gyllenhaal is conscientious and able as Tony but Tom Ford’s penchant for elegant design exposes the artificiality of the proceedings – especially the matching of Tony’s and Susan’s actions:  he takes a bath or  shower to cool down after each new stage of his trauma; Susan does likewise, to recover from the shock of reading about it.  This fancy rhyming is more damaging to Gyllenhaal in the Texas badlands than it is to Amy Adams in the deliberately chilly chic of Susan’s world.   As the vicious psycho Ray Marcus, Aaron Taylor-Johnson may be slightly better than usual but, playing a character who’s meant to be scary and unpredictable, he needs to be much better.  Taylor-Johnson is at the centre of a scene that illustrates perhaps better than any other the nullifying effects of Tom Ford’s style above substance.  Andes and Tony go to interview Marcus while he’s sitting on a toilet (which is placed outside his front door).  Not only do we see Marcus wiping his bum; after he’s done so, we also get a momentary shot of the piece of toilet paper he’s used.  If Ford means this to shock, he fails:  the viewer is less likely to be disgusted than to note the discreetness of the brown marks on the white paper.

    A few of the images created by Ford and his cinematographer Seamus McGarvey are more powerful, at least in their immediate impact – none more so than those in the film’s opening titles sequence.  This features a succession of drum majorettes strutting their stuff.  They are far from young, seriously overweight, and virtually naked except for their headgear.  The look and the movement of their bodies are extraordinary.  The women are then revealed to be part of a new installation at Susan’s gallery and don’t connect substantially with anything that follows in Nocturnal Animals – except for one detail.  I may have imagined this but I thought the woman to whom Ford’s camera keeps returning during this intro had a bloodstain at the side of her mouth; if so, this anticipates a wound on the mouth of Tony’s daughter when her corpse is discovered.  This might be just another example of Tom Ford’s patterning but it could also be a relatively convincing instance of Susan, as she reads ‘Nocturnal Animals’, drawing on her own experience to visualise details of the novel.

    Amy Adams gives a technically impressive performance. Although she’s playing a woman around her own age, the immobility of her face suggests a world-weary mask:  Adams makes Susan beautifully old before her time.  She may be insomniac but she also seems a sleepwalker in her own life.   When she sustains the paper cut, a majordomo is on hand to take over the opening of Edward’s surprise package.  In the last scene of the film, Susan goes to meet Edward for a dinner date.  (As a final way of getting his own back, he doesn’t show up.)  She’s escorted into the restaurant and to her table by her PA, before a waiter takes over attending to her.  This is a woman whose privilege is virtually debilitating.  The contrast with her vitality in the flashback scenes with Edward is enough to be almost poignant.  In the short time they share the screen, Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal really spark each other.  I think these bits are strong not just because we’re shown Susan and Edward in happier times (initially, at least) but also because the two stars get to do some acting in them and achieve a short-lived independence from Ford’s image-making.  It didn’t make sense to me that Armie Hammer had the same glazed, impersonal handsomeness as both the Hutton who took Susan away from Edward and the one with whom she’s become so bored that she’s nearly indifferent to his affairs with other women.  Laura Linney, Andrea Riseborough and Michael Sheen all do expert work in one-scene roles (Linney as Susan’s mother, Riseborough and Sheen as LA beau monde friends).  Abel Korzienowski’s score includes hints of Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo music – apt enough for a movie whose protagonist, like Vertigo‘s Scottie, clings unhappily to an idea of another person that amounts to mistaken identity.  But Tom Ford is no Alfred Hitchcock.

    4 November 2016

  • The Light Between Oceans

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Derek Cianfrance (2016)

    The Place Beyond the Pines, Derek Cianfrance’s previous film, had (unconvincing) pretensions to being a modern Greek tragedy.  There are lofty touches in Cianfrance’s latest too, which is set in Australia, mostly in the 1920s.  The melancholy, withdrawn Tom Sherbourne (Michael Fassbender), recently returned from action in the Great War, takes a job as a lighthouse-keeper at Janus Rock, named for its dual aspect between the Pacific and Indian Oceans.  (Janus Island is a real place off the coast of Western Australia although it didn’t in fact get its name until 1955.)  The pivotal event in The Light Between Oceans occurs when a rowing boat, containing a dead man and a live baby girl, washes up near the lighthouse.  It seems highly unlikely the baby would have made it through this ocean voyage when the adult male didn’t:  the only alternative to dismissing her survival as ridiculous is to accept it as a mysterious fact and the baby Anadyomene as kin to survivors in Shakespeare’s late plays.

    Tom Sherbourne weds Isabel Graysmark (Alicia Vikander) in 1921.  She suffers two miscarriages in the first years of their marriage.  Fearing she’ll never be able to have a child of her own, Isabel pleads with her husband to let her keep the baby the sea has brought them.  Tom refuses at first – he knows it’s his duty to report full details of the discovery to the authorities – but he capitulates to Isabel.  He buries the man’s body and the couple raise the child, whom they name Lucy, as their own.  Shortly before Lucy’s christening on the mainland, Tom sees a woman in the churchyard.  She is kneeling by a gravestone, which bears the names of a man and a baby lost at sea on the very day that the boat washed up at Janus Rock.  The baby’s original name was Grace.  Tom keeps his discovery a secret from Isabel but, three years later, the Sherbournes meet Hannah Roennfeldt (Rachel Weisz) and her sister Gwen (Emily Barclay) at a ceremony commemorating an anniversary of the lighthouse.  They get into conversation with Gwen, who explains Hannah’s tragedy.  The truth becomes clear to the distraught Isabel.

    By this point, only the most optimistic viewers will still be entertaining hopes of substantial connection with classical mythology or Shakespeare:  it’s become clear that the unconvincing storyline is not a means of exploring rich and strange themes but merely a matter of narrative convenience.  We learn, in verbal explanations supported by visual-aid flashbacks, that Hannah’s husband Frank (Leon Ford) was subject to anti-German prejudice in the aftermath to World War I; after an argument with Hannah, he jumped into a boat and went to sea with the newborn baby.  As you do.  It’s hard to believe in the first place that the professionally conscientious Tom would give in to Isabel about burying the corpse and keeping Lucy – that he doesn’t suggest to his wife that they can try again for children.  (There’s no hint they ever do try.)  It’s harder still to accept that a man with Tom’s capacity for keeping his own counsel would, after seeing the gravestone inscription, risk intensifying Hannah’s distress by sending her an anonymous letter, which tells her that her husband’s dead but her baby’s alive and well cared for.  In view of Tom’s line of work, the fact that Hannah’s wealthy father (Bryan Brown) is some kind of sponsor of the lighthouse and their regular contact with Isabel’s parents on the mainland, it’s surprising the Roennfeldts’ sad story hasn’t come to the Sherbournes’ attention sooner.

    Unlike Derek Cianfrance’s three previous dramatic features, this new one is based not on an original screenplay which he wrote or co-wrote but on a different author’s work.  The Light Between Oceans was the best-selling debut novel of M L Stedman and published in Australia in 2012.  This may be unfair to Stedman but there’s a rising sense of mismatch between the daft plot and the seriousness with which Cianfrance treats it.  Anthony Lane in the New Yorker describes the film as ‘oddly old-fashioned’.  It certainly needs to be more thoroughly old-fashioned:  a Hollywood treatment of this kind of melodrama a few decades back would have gone with the grain of the source material, instead of straining fruitlessly for emotional depth.   There are awesome seascapes, photographed by Adam Arkapaw, and an Alexandre Desplat score that suggests surging passions but Cianfrance cleaves continually to creating a human tale that’s smaller and tougher, and at odds with these other elements.  The depth of characterisation of two of the three main actors serves to expose rather than conceal the story’s improbabilities and evasions.

    Rachel Weisz is particularly strong but the reality she gives to Hannah’s grief makes it a worse omission that she’s denied the opportunity to rail at the Sherbournes for what they’ve done to her life – especially since Lucy-Grace (Florence Clery), when she’s returned to Hannah, understandably wants Isabel back.  Tom feels guilty at having survived the war when so many others didn’t and that he is bound to pay for the added good fortune of loving and living with Isabel.  Michael Fassbender is almost too convincing as a man who expects the worst to happen; at least this ensures that we share Tom’s experience of rare moments of pleasure or high spirits as an unexpected gift – when Isabel first brings him out of his shell as they sit and talk, or when Tom plays games with Lucy.   The film ends with an unexpected reunion between the late-middle-aged Tom and the adult Lucy-Grace (Caren Pistorius, confirming the good impression she made in Slow West), who now has a child of her own.  The widowed Tom, though no longer a lighthouse-keeper, still lives in complete seclusion:  Fassbender, with the help of some fine aging make-up, is especially convincing in this epilogue.  As in The Danish Girl, Alicia Vikander switches quite abruptly from initial girlish charm to all-out suffering.  The former is nicely done but Vikander doesn’t create much connection between the two versions of Isabel.   When she pleads with Tom that they keep the baby, it would be good to be reminded that this is the same girl who, earlier in the story, urged Tom – with the same surprising and wholehearted impulsiveness – to marry her.  There’s no such reminder:  Alicia Vikander has by now changed tack to tragic mode.   She’s an unexpectedly good runner, however – she proves it in a couple of sprints from the lighthouse to the seashore.

    Each of the three big European actors deploys an Australian accent that might kindly be described as restrained.  The real thing is supplied by a supporting cast whose naturalistic playing is often impressive.  Jane Menelaus and Garry McDonald, as Isabel’s parents, are excellent:  the dynamics of the dinner-table conversation at the Graysmarks’ home, when Tom visits for the first time, are beautifully achieved by Derek Cianfrance.   Even the actors playing law officers and others who bring Tom Sherbourne to ‘justice’ are less crudely vengeful than you’d expect.  There are plenty of talented people involved in this movie but their taste and discretion are ill-suited to the task in hand.  Asked how she can find it in her heart to forgive the Sherbournes, Hannah recalls her late husband’s reply, when she asked him how he could forgive the locals for their racist abuse:  you need forgive only once; you have to remind yourself to resent every day.  This appealing idea is so patently untrue that even Frank Roennfeldt forgets about it when he makes the fateful decision to row out to sea.  We seem meant to accept it, nevertheless, as the uplifting moral of the story of The Light Between Oceans.    This might have been a more successful film if more of those involved in making it had been infected by the hokey shamelessness that shaped Frank’s motto.

    3 November 2016

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