NOCTURNAL ANIMALS
★★★★★
FROM MARCH 1 / RATED MA15+ / DIRECTOR Tom Ford /
CAST Jake Gyllenhaal, Amy Adams, Michael
Shannon, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Isla Fisher
A story within a (worse) story
IT’S WON A swag of awards,
and sits irmly on last year’s
must-see lists. But like the
eye-popping opening sequence
(which is perhaps the most
out-there two minutes of ilm you’ll
see all year), Tom Ford’s second outing feels
more like an arty curiosity than a triumph of
story-telling.
Art gallery owner Susan (Amy Adams)
divorced aspiring novelist Edward (Jake
Gyllenhaal) for non-speciic Wall St moneyman
Hutton (Armie Hammer), but she secretly wonders
if she made the right choice when his manuscript,
dedicated to her, arrives in the mail; Susan becomes
increasingly engrossed in Edward’s story as the
parallels to her real life are revealed. Gyllenhaal
also plays Tony, the main character of Edward’s
book: Tony’s life is shattered when a gang of
rednecks accosts his family in the middle of
nowhere, West Texas.
Gyllenhaal as Tony is all electric anxiety and
crushing guilt; he’s a convincing stand-in for who
we fear we’d be in an emergency. Is it un-masculine
to avoid violence? When does principle merge into
cowardice? It’s compelling stuff. Michael Shannon
is typically brilliant as the Texan detective Bobby
Andes; Aaron Taylor-Johnson is seductively
menacing as the alpha redneck.
The “book-within-a-movie” storyline is by far
the most gripping part of the ilm; outside of the
novel, the “real-life” storylines feel like the ultimate
distillation of irst world problems (‘I’m unfulilled
by running my expensive art gallery, and I feel so
lonely in my enormous mansion. Should I dismiss
the staff and stay at the beach house?’), which
serves well to underscore the emptiness of Susan’s
life, but equally works as a barrier to the audience
caring in any way at all.
Amy Adams works hard to bring depth to
those portions of the ilm, but the struggles of
ictional Tony (yes, they’re all ictional, but you
know what we mean) contrast sharply to Susan’s
petty concerns. And when, as a ilmmaker, youmanage to prove that half your ilm is shallow
and irrelevant, is that a success or not?
It’s artfully constructed — the ilm weaves
between two real-world time periods and the
ictional world, as each helps shade the others
— and visually beautifully (even when it perhaps
shouldn’t be: the artfully staged bodies in the
ictional world look more like a Vogue shoot than a
crime scene). But the “real life” scenes feel very
staged, and their coldness saps the tension from the
more vital “ictional” scenes. It’s ironic that a ilm
that ultimately lauds feeling over thinking, should
be so coldly calculated.
EXTRAS TBC. RICH YEAGERBILLY LYNN’S LONG
HALFTIME WALK
★★★★★
FROM MARCH 1 / RATED MA15+ / DIRECTOR Ang Lee /
CAST Joe Alwyn, Garrett Hedlund, Steve Martin,
Chris Tucker, Vin Diesel, Kristen StewartAng Lee’s Long Disappointing Film
THE BIGGEST GRIPE
about Ang Lee’s adaptation was
that it was shot at a super-high
frame rate that was even more
obnoxious than Peter Jackson’s
Hobbit movies. But the real
problem with BLLHW isn’t the technical aspect;
it’s the ilm itself. Somehow, one of the greatilmmakers of our time has taken two giant
American spectacles — war, and the Super Bowl
halftime show — and managed to make them
slightly dull. In part, it’s because it feels like
there’s nothing real at stake. There’s a few
bad-ass moments from Lynn’s Iraq deployment,
but since they’re all lashbacks, it’s obvious that
almost everyone comes out of them ok; the
only person who doesn’t, also gets almost no
screentime, so it never really hits home. There’s a
tentative romance, but it feels largely unearned;
there’s a subplot with Lynn’s sister (Kristen
Stewart) that never gets very far off the ground;
there’s a grumble with an NFL team owner
(Steve Martin) that feels like a storm in a teacup:
it’s all just a bit... meh. And after all that, the
super talky ending (it’s pretty much the polar
opposite of show-don’t-tell) manages to feel even
more like an anti-climax. Also — spoiler alert
— Billy does take a walk at halftime, but it’s not
very long at all. Like, 10 steps, tops.
EXTRAS Five featurettes on different elements,
deleted scenes. TIM KEEN“Siri, why is my life
so meaningless?”