"Nocturnal Animals": A cautionary tale about the dangers of marrying bad writers

At first, Nocturnal Animals feels like a riff on movie thrillers: It’s set in Los Angeles, where Amy Adams plays Susan Morrow, the owner of a hip (and bankrupt) L.A. art gallery, and the opening sequence features various, nude, obese middle-aged and elderly women, dancing and flaunting their jiggly bodies with audacious confidence: Edith Massey on the outside and Marilyn Monroe on the inside. (Edith Massey was the snaggletoothed, ditzy, delightfully mad older woman who appeared in many of John Waters’ early films, including Pink Flamingos and Polyester). During the show’s after-party, Susan makes conversation, spilling her guts (about her frustrated marriage) to a funky-looking artist-friend, whose big curly hair and long, flowing dress and big earrings seem pickled in the 1970s: she looks like the kind of gaudy woman who’d end up stabbing someone to death in a Dario Argento horror film. There are shades of Brian De Palma, and even whispers of that delightfully awful 1994 film Color of Night, the worst erotic thriller ever made (one that is incredibly watchable in all its glorious badness). 

These impressions might spell a derivative but lewdly entertaining movie, especially in the hands of writer-director Tom Ford, who first worked as a production designer and whose eye for beauty is so keen in the not-entirely-successful but gorgeous 2009 film A Single Man. But Nocturnal Animals makes a number of disappointing structural blunders. Much of the film dramatizes the novel Susan is reading, a manuscript she receives from her ex-husband, Edward, played by Jake Gyllenhaal. Susan’s marriage ended badly, because she cheated on Edward (with her current husband, played by Armie Hammer), and the movie emits a grim energy, as though this novel, which is violent and disturbing and clearly borrows from Edward’s past with Susan, is some kind of revenge fantasy. (He even dedicated it to her.)

The novel and its dramatization are nasty and unappealing to Susan, and to us. The story involves a family being accosted by three psychopaths in an isolated part of Texas in the dead of night. The husband, Tony (also played by Gyllenhaal), is left for dead, his wife and daughter are raped and murdered, and the killers vanish without a trace, until a dogged, lung cancer-afflicted investigator (Michael Shannon), helps Tony track them down. 

Because she has nothing to do but read a book, Susan's only active participation in the story must occur in flashbacks, where we see Susan and Edward, once childhood friends, falling in love, against the will of Susan’s Southern-belle mama, played by Laura Linney, with her hair all poofed up and a delightful Blanche Devereaux-esque accent that I could listen to for days. (Tom Ford clearly has an affinity for brassy, bossy women, yet Linney’s character gets minimal screen time, and Susan Morrow is practically a blank.) Mama didn’t approve of Edward because he was poor and sensitive, but Susan married him anyway, and now, everything her mother said would happen has happened: “The things you love about him now are the things you will hate about him in a few years,” she says softly, her threatening prophecy steeped in matronly tenderness. 

When a movie makes its main character passive, it better have a darn good reason. Jimmy Stewart, confined to a wheelchair in Rear Window, turns into a neighborhood snoop, out of boredom, and when he witnesses a murder, enlists his girlfriend Grace Kelly and his physical therapist Thelma Ritter to help him prove it. Thus, Alfred Hitchcock made Stewart’s character active by proxy. But Nocturnal Animals doesn’t know what to do with Amy Adams’ character. There’s nothing compelling about Susan, which makes her passiveness all the more dull. Thus, for Susan, everything hinges on the narrative revealed to us in flashbacks, but those aren’t compelling either. She essentially becomes unhappy with her current husband, and ditches him for another one. 

And so Nocturnal Animals alternates between blandness and nastiness. Laura Linney’s performance, as well as the performances of Shannon and of Aaron-Taylor Johnson (as one of the killers), give the film some vitality, but it’s not enough to save the film from its own bad plot. The final scene, when Susan goes to meet Edward for dinner and he stands her up, should be an emotionally powerful moment. But Susan hasn’t been enough of a cold bitch to warrant our hate, and she’s not sympathetic enough for us to care about her. Moreover, Susan’s judgment has really gone downhill: She criticized Edward’s writing when they were together, but now she raves about this crappy novel in an email she sends him. Then again, she agreed to meet with Edward for drinks in the first place, another sign that her judgment is not to be trusted. Anyone who dedicates a novel like this to you, should be avoided at all costs. 

Mr. Holmes

In Mr. Holmes, Ian McKellen takes what might otherwise have been a very superficial piece of anglophilia and elevates it to the level of something deeply moving. McKellen plays Sherlock Holmes, now in his early 90s and living in voluntary exile at his cottage in Sussex, perhaps the only time he’s ever lived away from the whirling metropolis of London, where he made his reputation as the world’s greatest detective.

The film, which is based on Mitch Cullin’s book A Slight Trick of the Mind, follows several threads of Holmes’s life: the present, which involves his relationship with frumpy housekeeper Laura Linney and her adorable, adoring son Roger, played by Milo Parker, who tempers a fiery curiosity about life with a kind of rural English cuteness. With features that completely fill his smallish V-shaped head, he looks like a child-version of Dominic Cooper. 

The film also goes back in time to two separate adventures of Sherlock Holmes, one involving a recent trip to Japan ostensibly to find a plant called prickly ash, which is reputably a remedy for arthritis and memory loss. (Holmes is becoming more and more forgetful, and when his doctor suggests that he begin tallying in a journal the number of times he forgets things each day, the still-sharp detective quips, “And what if I forget to mark them?”) The final thread involves a case in which Holmes trailed a grieving young woman who—almost like the obsessed Madeleine in Vertigo—is entranced by the glass harmonica. Her husband thinks that her musician-tutor has gotten her into the dark arts.

Somehow, director Bill Condon has taken something that should have been cheap sentiment mixed with bad literary nostalgia and turned it into a beautifully layered study of aging, of friendship, of regret, of solitude, of all the tensions that we face sooner or later in life. Roger, the boy, becomes enamored of Holmes, and their budding friendship invigorates him and motivates Holmes to finish writing the narrative of the case of the entranced woman, even though he cannot remember how the case turned out. He’s haunted by a sense of guilt to which he cannot attribute a source.

There’s a wonderful scene between the three of them, Holmes, Linney and Parker, in which the boy sharply insults his mother, of whom he’s clearly ashamed. “She can barely read!” he scolds, appealing to Holmes’s hyper-intelligence. Holmes’s reaction is powerful. He looks like he’d just witnessed an avalanche, and in a sense he has. That moment, each actor holds his or her own, even young Parker, who makes quite an impression. There are a number of complex feelings circulating through the room in that scene, and Condon (with the help, I’m sure, of screenwriter Jeffrey Hatcher) handles them with precision. 

The movie doesn’t try to neatly resolve emotions that have calcified over many years of time. It unpacks these heavy emotions and treats them with their due respect. And yet, the film doesn’t bog you down with its own weight. It's a very strong movie, but it's also refreshingly airy. McKellen’s beautifully wistful and spry performance, the anchor of this film to be sure, is measured enough to offer equal shares of pathos, levity, and light. I was disappointed that Laura Linney had such a dismal role, but even she vests her character with a kind of stoic dignity. She’s from the lower-class but her son is smart, and this relationship establishes an interesting tension. Holmes remarks with characteristic bluntness, “Often times exceptional people come from unremarkable parents.” It’s really not meant to insult, and perhaps only an actor like McKellen can get away with it. He’s far too likable for a comment like that to give much offense. And at the end of the film, when the boy’s health is endangered, Holmes's genuine, deep compassion and sorrow is powerful. It pierces the mother’s bitterness like a lance.

One of the most remarkable elements of Mr. Holmes is the film’s attention to sensory detail. It's a movie that feels wholly in touch with its environment and with the objects that populate it, from things found in a house or a bookstore or on a train to things growing in the grass. (I couldn't help but notice the thick billowing smoke as it frothed out of the trains; and I was delighted by the rocky beaches and the frothy waters of the sea, where Holmes and Roger swim in a scene near the end of the movie.) Holmes has become a beekeeper in his old age, and this proves a source of fascination for young Roger, who learns to care for the bees himself. The honey harvested by the bees, we learn, is yet another of Holmes’s attempts to cure his senility. 

There are plenty of shots of the beautiful countryside too. It’s almost too perfectly, gorgeously English to live. You suspect they're overdoing it on purpose, and yet it’s hard not to be awed by the gorgeous, lush landscapes and the charming quaintness of the cottage and all the silver and furniture and leather books and trinkets: Holmes's old pen, dipped in oily-black ink; the faded white glove--worn by the entranced woman--hidden in Watson's old desk; the old magnifying glass, the mail wrapped in brown parcel paper. All of these little things offer captivating little worlds of their own, adding to the texture of Mr. Holmes, and making it feel earthy and lived-in. I hope I'm not overstating my case here. It's just kind of miraculous to see a movie like this in the summer.

The Fifth Estate

With The Social Network and now The Fifth Estate we're seeing the emergence of a new subgenre: the 21st century tech thriller. Of course, there were other techy thrillers before, like The Net. (Remember? Sandra Bullock's identity stolen via dial-up internet.) The Fifth Estate is about Julian Assange, the Australian creator of Wiki Leaks. In 2010, Assange became the source of great controversy when he leaked classified U.S. documents (including Afghan war logs and diplomatic communications). With all the hubbub about Edward Snowden's high-profile whistle-blowing this year, one can only imagine that he will soon get a techy thriller of his own, especially if The Fifth Estate does well at the box office (though we were an admittedly small audience in the theater tonight).

The Fifth Estate is an absorbing movie from start to finish: Benedict Cumberbatch possesses the necessary qualities to portray a high-strung mad genius. He's done it before as Sherlock, and his take on Assange isn't all that different from the opiom-charged London sleuth with more than a little contempt for the average citizen. Daniel Bruhl, as Assange's right hand man, and the moral conscience of the Wiki Leaks organization, is the Dr. Watson of the movie. He's also the film's best asset aside from Cumberbatch's wonderfully intense, electric personality: Bruhl's character is a serious but likable young man with a beard that makes him look like a German hipster teddy bear (that's supposed to be a compliment) and a valiant personal mission to maintain Assange's moral integrity. For those among us who find Cumberbatch's Assange fascinating but aloof, Bruhl gives us a hero to root for. Without him, this movie would not be as sympathetic, and without Cumberbatch, it wouldn't be as edgy.

We must credit the writer--Josh Singer, who based the script on two books, one of them by Daniel Berg (Bruhl's character)--with conjuring up a screenplay that's intelligent without being confusing. This is a (mostly) lucidly written film that gives us a good, dramatic story without all the jargon that often hinders movies about the Digital Age. Instead, both Singer and director Bill Condon focus on the moral imperatives at the heart of this story: freedom of speech and freedom of information.

But we're also privy to the moral mission of the U.S. government, which is understandably in a tizzy, concerned about not only the embarrassment of leaked diplomatic memos but also the potential harm that could come to various informants across the globe. (And of course, the allegations of improper military conduct look rather unflattering.) Laura Linney and Stanley Tucci play the State Department heads that are trying to clamp down on the information war, all the while aware that they're fighting a losing battle. Both of these actors carry the confidence of old pros, and they're fun to watch.

The Fifth Estate is a solid piece of Hollywood intrigue. I can't speak for the veracity of the film as far as the actual Assange story goes, but I hope none of us trusts in the absolutism of the movies when it comes to history. But who cares if Julian Assange himself has already criticized the film, for whatever reason? This is a fun, enthralling movie that has quickly tapped into the minefield of 21st century geopolitics. The world of The Fifth Estate is overwhelmingly immediate: we're left with the feeling that we've just watched two hours of a documentary, even if the film isn't totally accurate. It's a rousing champion of free speech, and a compelling portrait of how even the highest moral missions can be complicated by the egotistical delusions of grandeur of a passionate rebel.

With Anthony Mackie, David Thewlis, and Alicia Vikander. 128 minutes. ★★★