![]() Gyllenhaal continues his recent run of strong performances as Edward/Tony, although his character is by nature secondary. But despite the distance between them, both of the film’s locales-gleaming, spotless Los Angeles arid, sun-scorched Texas-remain relatively sterile and lifeless. “We all eventually turn into our mothers.”) Meanwhile Tony, Edward’s literary stand-in, suffers wounds decidedly more vivid in nature. (Laura Linney has a marvelous cameo in flashback as Susan’s socialite mother, warning that she would eventually do exactly this: “Just wait,” she purrs. Susan wounded her ex-love Edward grievously when she left him over his writerly dreaminess and lack of ambition. When Tony bathes, in order to scrape off the dust and sweat of West Texas, Susan bathes, because-well, that what you apparently do if you’re a wealthy Los Angelean who’s lost interest in her career and her marriage. The two stories are artfully intertwined-at times a bit too artfully. At the center of it all, Adams remains something of a cypher. Tony’s “fictional” story is interspersed with Susan’s “real” one-though to be fair, hers mostly consists of reading the novel, taking baths, lying awake in bed, and having flashbacks to her long ago love affair with the book’s author, Edward. Suffice to say that the remainder of the novel concerns Tony’s quest for justice and/or vengeance, a quest in which he is aided by one Detective Bobby Andes (Michael Shannon). I will leave their fate to the imagination, though the film itself is not so kind. (In a cunning bit of casting, the wife is played by Isla Fisher, who thus fulfills her manifest destiny of serving as Amy Adams’s understudy.) Their car is forced off the road by a trio of rural thugs, who abduct Tony’s wife and daughter. The text of the novel provides a film-within-the-film: Tony Hastings (also played by Gyllenhaal) is taking a road trip with his wife and daughter that entails a late-night drive across the barren scrub of West Texas. The book is dedicated to her and titled, after the nickname Edward had bestowed upon her due to her insomnia, Nocturnal Animals. It’s clear that Adams has achieved the life that she always wanted, and that it’s hardly a life at all.īut then Susan receives a package in the mail, a book manuscript from the lover, Edward Sheffield (Jake Gyllenhaal), to whom she was briefly married in her early twenties. (Entering the premises is a bit like climbing into a piece of high-end kitchen equipment.) Her successful husband (Armie Hammer) is increasingly neither: his failing business serves as an excuse for the “late nights” that keep him from her bed and the “work trip” that interferes with her hoped-for beach getaway. mansion locked tight behind a polished metal gate. Nor is this ennui limited to her professional life. How appropriate, then, that the film’s protagonist, Susan Morrow (Amy Adams), owns an art gallery, and one for which she has largely lost her enthusiasm. Doctors Aren’t Sure How This Even Came Out of a Patient Haley Weiss
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