Doctor Strange
I'll Lock Up
- Messages
- 5,228
- Location
- Hudson Valley, NY
Nocturnal Animals. A fascinating, beautiful, and at times terrifying film directed by clothing designer Tom Ford. (Whose earlier feature, A Single Man, is also very good.)
Wealthy, reserved, uber-glamorous LA art gallery owner Amy Adams, whose marriage to Armie Hammer is failing, receives an advance copy of her ex-husband (Jake Gyllenhall)'s new novel, which is dedicated to her and called "Nocturnal Animals" - his old nickname for her alluding to her insomnia, which is now even worse. Unable to sleep, she reads the book and we enter the story... wherein an ordinary family - Gyllenhall again, Isla Fisher (*), and their daughter - is terrorized on a Texas highway. Later, a near-retirement lawman, Michael Shannon, figures in the aftermath. Outside the book - disturbed by its parallels - Adams flashes back on her brief first marriage.
(* This is meta casting. For years, Fisher and Adams - same-age redheads both known for comic roles at first - were frequently confused, and often in competition for the same parts.)
This is a serious, disturbing film. (Full disclosure: I fast-forwarded through some of the highway sequence, which I found painfully dread-inducing.) Made with a designer's eye, it's beautifully shot and costumed. Gyllenhaal and Adams are both superb in their dual roles - younger Adams and older Adams are almost different characters - and they're believably 20 years younger in the flashbacks... so much so that I wonder if some digital de-aging was used. Shannon is also excellent - not that that's a surprise, he always is - and received an Oscar nomination.
Recommended... but I warned you about that highway scene.
(What a year Amy Adams had last year, with outstanding performances in this film and Arrival. Unfortunately, she also had Batman V Superman: Dawn of Dreck, where her whip-smart Lois Lane - one of few pleasures of Man of Steel - was required by the awful screenplay to do one inexcusably stupid thing after another!)
Wealthy, reserved, uber-glamorous LA art gallery owner Amy Adams, whose marriage to Armie Hammer is failing, receives an advance copy of her ex-husband (Jake Gyllenhall)'s new novel, which is dedicated to her and called "Nocturnal Animals" - his old nickname for her alluding to her insomnia, which is now even worse. Unable to sleep, she reads the book and we enter the story... wherein an ordinary family - Gyllenhall again, Isla Fisher (*), and their daughter - is terrorized on a Texas highway. Later, a near-retirement lawman, Michael Shannon, figures in the aftermath. Outside the book - disturbed by its parallels - Adams flashes back on her brief first marriage.
(* This is meta casting. For years, Fisher and Adams - same-age redheads both known for comic roles at first - were frequently confused, and often in competition for the same parts.)
This is a serious, disturbing film. (Full disclosure: I fast-forwarded through some of the highway sequence, which I found painfully dread-inducing.) Made with a designer's eye, it's beautifully shot and costumed. Gyllenhaal and Adams are both superb in their dual roles - younger Adams and older Adams are almost different characters - and they're believably 20 years younger in the flashbacks... so much so that I wonder if some digital de-aging was used. Shannon is also excellent - not that that's a surprise, he always is - and received an Oscar nomination.
Recommended... but I warned you about that highway scene.
(What a year Amy Adams had last year, with outstanding performances in this film and Arrival. Unfortunately, she also had Batman V Superman: Dawn of Dreck, where her whip-smart Lois Lane - one of few pleasures of Man of Steel - was required by the awful screenplay to do one inexcusably stupid thing after another!)
