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The Hidden Subject of Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals:

The Center Comes Undone

There are visual and literary artists whose subject and theme is alienation. In literature there is Albert Camus and Joan Didion and in cinema, Antonioni, Robert Bresson and now Tom Ford. And it is interesting to note: that these artists in their examination of alienation that all of them counteract this vision of the emptiness of existence through rigorous means of artful precision and detail. As if art is their last standing salvation against a vision so burning that they can no longer ignore it themselves but can only nullify through artful rendering.

Nocturnal Animals is a case study of cinematic editing that provokes the various states of consciousness one crosses through with that delicate apparatus called the human mind. One is rarely fully in the present moment but instead one is journeying through past, present, projected future and much of it distorted by the bias of the person.

The Amy Adams character is caught in a labyrinth: her emotional status wavering due to the stress of her existence, and by the intruding past in the form of a novel written by her ex-husband. The novel is about revenge and it is also his revenge on her. In point of fact, in her gallery there resides an art work that spells out the word REVENGE.

The film faces the challenges of veering from present reality to the past and back as well incorporating the content of the fictional story of the novel Amy is reading and it does so brilliantly. In the end the Amy Adams character has come face to face with the sadness of her existence. She has become what she dreaded most: her mother.

The character of the mother is given only one scene and is referred to by Jake Gyllenhaal on his first date with Amy Adams but the mother is a key component. As Jake says, the mother has the same sad eyes as her daughter and Amy rebels against the idea but as her own mother warns: there is no escaping.

The Texas sequences depicting the content of the novel are unnerving but they feel more alive and real than the Amy Adams character’s life in LA. Tom Form renders LA as a hermetically sealed world within a world. It is as if artist Tom Ford is surveying the trappings of designer Tom Ford’s world. This creates a Brechtian distancing effect.

But everything adds up in its the final images, just as he did in A Single Man, the final moments are haunting; the true sadness of missed opportunities, of a missed life and that is the hidden subject of Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals: that most of life is lived in the mind and often with regret of what could had been if only.

 

Joseph Lally