Animal Nature

 Nocturnal Animals (2016) is a weird one. It was directed by fashion designer Tom Ford, and is very fashionable, and somewhat repellent.

It starts with several naked fat ladies, dancing in slow motion, waving little American flags and sparklers, wearing nothing bur red, white, and blue party hats and cowboy boots. This goes on for quite a while, as the point of view moves out and you see that this is an art installation, a gallery show. One of the attendees, the host in fact, is Amy Adams.

Amy goes home to her fancy, art-filled house and husband, Armie Hammer. She isn't too happy with her opening, and Armie doesn't cheer her up much. She wants to spend some time with him, he has to leave for a "business trip". Since her daughter is going for away too, it looks like she will be alone for the weekend.

But a manuscript shows up in the mail. It's a novel written by her first husband, titled "Nocturnal Animals". As she reads, we drop into the movie within the movie.

Jake Gyllenhaal, his wife Isla Fisher, and young daughter are driving through west Texas. Just as the daughter loses cell reception, some punks in a couple of cars start hassling them, and run them off the road. They are threatening but mostly reasonable, but they wind up taking the women away from Gyllenhaal and leaving him in the middle of the desert.

He gets out and finally gets some police help from Michael Shannon, but it's too late. They find the women naked and dead. Gyllenhall is crushed by grief and the shame that he couldn't help them.

We drop out of this movie now and then to find Adams very affected - she had divorced the author because she didn't think much of his artistic prospects, a judgment shared by her mother Laura Linney, as we see in flashbacks. But she thinks this book will be a hit. It is affecting her deeply, but maybe not in a healthy way, since she can't sleep. She has to keep reading. 

We see a certain amount of modern art in this movie, and often see Adams contemplating, studying it. However, it seemed to me that it was mostly art famous for being more expensive than good. She has had a Jeff Koons balloon dog installed in her yard recently. Now I don't know what Tom Ford thinks of Koons, but I think the consensus is that he is a bit of a fraud, or at least a showman in the tradition of Andy Warhol. We see Damien Hirst's St. Sebastian - a bull pierced by arrows. Hirst is the guy who covered a human skull with diamonds and sold it for some ridiculous price. More of a stunt than a work of art. So I feel like Adams, though sympathetic, is being set up as a shallow trend follower - an art dealer who works with a corporate board, rather than an art lover.

And, like the women in the novel, she gets hers in the end. Not violently, like them or the bull in Hirst's work. In fact, somewhat ambiguously. But the movie doesn't seem to love, or at least not to wish her well.