Nocturnal Animals

For anyone with a serious redhead fetish, ‘Nocturnal Animals’ – which features no less a quartet of world-class beauties of said hair colour than Amy Adams, Isla Fisher, Ellie Bamber and India Menuez – might well prove their ‘Citizen Kane’. (It also stars Andrea Riseborough, an equally not-troubled-by-the-ugly stick redhead, but buries her under a brunette frightwig.) For anyone else … hmmm, well …

‘Nocturnal Animals’ is a Tom Ford film. I know this because the opening credits are ushered in by the authorial statement “a Tom Ford film”. As are the closing credits. Seriously, the moment the final shot fades to black, there it is: “a Tom Ford film”. But let’s get back to the opening credits for a moment. As they crawl towards their interminable conclusion, overlaying slow motion shots of morbidly obese people dancing naked in slo-mo – a series of images that has no bearing on what follows and is never revisited – the last three are “produced by Tom Ford”, “screenplay by Tom Ford” and “directed by Tom Ford”.

Tom Ford has obviously never heard of the traditional “written, produced and directed by” credit. Or he has, but rejects it in favour of stamping his name on his product as omnipresently as possible. Tom Ford is also a fashion designer, and it might be that his fixation with labels extends to his new career as a director. ‘Nocturnal Animals’ is his second film and it should probably be legislated that you don’t get to say “a Your Name film” on your films until you’ve directed at least half a dozen of them and genuinely proved yourself as an auteur.

But, for better or for worse, ‘Nocturnal Animals’ (one of the worst titles I’ve come across since Nick Willing’s ‘Photographing Fairies’ back in 1997) is a Tom Ford film, so let’s take a few paragraphs to discuss what it has to offer in all its Tom Fordy Tom Fordiness.

Art gallery owner Susan Morrow (Adams) is twenty years divorced from non-career-focused wannabe writer Edward Sheffield (Jake Gyllenhaal), trapped in a loveless second marriage to smooth bastard, philanderer and also-ran businessman Hutton (Armie Hammer) and a distant mother to Samantha (Menuez). Her life is perfectly ordered, sterile and about two steps away from total implosion. One day, she receives a proof copy of a novel Edward has had accepted for publication (it looks more like an amateurishly bound MS rather than a set of galleys or a bound uncorrected proof, but hey ho) and which is dedicated to her.

The novel tells the story of regular guy teacher Tony Hastings, his wife Laura and their daughter India and how their family vacation turns into a nightmare after an encounter with a bunch of rednecks. Minor spoiled: Laura and India are sexually assaulted and murdered while Tony, more through his captors’ stupidity than any proactive decision on his part, escapes. Dead inside, he partners with unorthodox lawman Bobby Andes to track down the perpetrators and take revenge.

As Susan reads, she imagines Edward as Tony, and drops in place surrogates for herself and Samantha as Laura and India (Fisher and Bamber respectively). Also, she imagines the story in vicious and uncompromising detail. Andes is played in this film-of-the-novel-within-a-film by Michael Shannon and he’s the absolute motherlovin’ best thing in ‘Nocturnal Animals’ by a wide margin. Everyone else seems stilted and ill at ease, even down to Riseborough and Michael Sheen turning in caricatures in bit parts. The hillbillies – portrayed grubbily by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Karl Glusman and Robert Aramayo – are no less clichéd.

I’ve read a broadsheet review which seriously tries to suggest that the filmed excerpts from the novel are comparable with Peckinpah. Bullshit! Peckinpah would have given the rednecks characters and rooted their motivation within a socio-economic framework, not to mention establishing a realistic dynamic as regards their interrelationships. But, y’know, Peckinpah could direct and that’s the difference.

Edward’s novel is about revenge, and in riffing on little details that force Susan to confront her memories, it is also an act of revenge in and of itself. As Susan’s carefully constructed rationales for her equally carefully constructed lifestyle begin to implode, she wanders through her gallery and is confronted by a painting she can’t even remember acquiring. Black paint on white canvas: the word “revenge”. At this point I wondered if Tom Ford was going to run round from behind the camera, flick a speck of non-existent dirt from his impeccable Tom Ford suit, point at the painting and enquire of the audience whether they were fully aware that this is a film about revenge. And then perhaps deliver a short lecture on how it’s also a film about how the hollow lives of upper-middle class entitled people who do each other emotional violence are thrown into sharp relief by the story of a life rendered hollow by an act of physical violence committed by the underclass.

Tom Ford’s obsession with the rednecks’ filthy lifestyles – right down to showing his audience a post-arse-wipe scrap of toilet paper (thanks, Tom) – is if anything more prurient than his love of lifestyle porn. Seamus McGarvey’s cinematography certainly emphasises this, exercising cool restraint as his camera prowls the art gallery or Susan’s clinically neat des res, then happily rubbing the viewer’s nose in degradation whenever the hillbillies are on screen. And can I say once again how fucking stereotypical these boys are? I half expected the end credits (“a Tom Ford film”) to refer to them as Bubba, JohnBoy and BillyBob Rapist.

‘Nocturnal Animals’ is undoubtedly well made. Thought went into every aspect of it. They way thought goes into films by Lars von Trier and Michael Haneke. And like those boys, for all the artfulness behind the enterprise, it’s difficult to shake the feeling that buttons are being pressed and controversy courted for its own sake. I’ve said before on these pages that von Trier and Haneke remind me of nine-year-olds who have just figured out that saying “fuck” in the playground gets a reaction and delight in proving that observation over and over again.

Tom Ford is playing from the same playbook – not to mention playing in the same sandbox – with ‘Nocturnal Animals’. He has a cast to die for, some incredibly talented collaborators behind the camera, none of which count for much in the face of his ego and what I can only suspect are a seething raft of issues that he’d be better off seeing a therapist about rather than inflicting on paying audiences.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #10: Burke & Hare

It’s not John Wayne or James Stewart or Lee Marvin or even Edmond O’Brien who gets the key line in John Ford’s ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’ – it’s Carleton Young as Maxwell Scott: “When the truth becomes legend, print the legend.”

In John Landis’s ‘Burke & Hare’, it’s a more a case of: “Is there even much of a legend anyway? Fuck it, just print any old bollocks.”

And so it is that we have Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis as Williams Burke and Hare – the latter cast after David Tennant dropped out, and I can’t help but wonder what it would have been like with Pegg and Tennant trading quips and making mayhem (Serkis gives a by-the-numbers performance, mugging through his scenes as if fully aware that he was the second choice) – two ne’er-do-wells trying make it rich in 1820s Edinburgh. The rivalry between anatomists Dr Robert Knox (Tom Wilkinson) and Professor Alexander Monro (Tim Curry) is turning nasty.

When Monro uses forged documentation to ensure that the bodies of any hanged in the city are delivered immediately to him for dissection – and with the militia patrolling cemeteries to discourage grave-robbers – Knox makes no bones, pardon the pun, about accepting corpses that have been, how to put this, encouraged along the way to meeting their maker.

‘Burke & Hare’ was produced through the then newly revived Ealing Studios and Landis has said in interview that he wanted to capture the spirit of classic black comedies such as ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’ or ‘The Ladykillers’. And there’s no doubt that the material lends itself to a certain kind of mordant humour. But whereas ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’ was elegant in its multiple murders and social satire, and ‘The Ladykillers’ played out as essentially a comedy of manners with bumbling thugs, Landis struggles to find – and indeed sustain – a tone for ‘Burke & Hare’. Some scenes are pure slapstick; some trade in humour so dark (such as the pair’s attempt to force a horse-drawn carriage off the road) that the punchline just withers and dies; and some are mawkish, particularly in matters pertaining to Burke’s infatuation with ambitious musical hall actress Ginny (Isla Fisher), an entirely fictionalised subplot which goes nowhere despite Fisher’s wholehearted performance.

Ultimately, Landis shores up the whole edifice with a parade of famous, and sometimes incongruous, faces: Christopher Lee and Jenny Agutter in nothing roles, Hugh Bonneville as an aristocrat with an agenda, Bill Bailey as a fourth-wall-breaking hangman, fellow directors Michael Winner and Costa-Gavras (I can only assume they visited the set and found themselves bundled into costumes), and Ronnie Corbert as the most unconvincing leader of a troop of militia in the entire history of moving pictures.

‘Burke & Hare’ could have been a taut and fast-paced piece of work with darkly comedic overtones; as it is, it kind of ambles along with the amiability of a shaggy dog story, enjoyable enough in an undemanding way while you’re watching, but leaving you feeling just a tad short-changed as the end credits roll.

Another thought on Now You See Me

Isla Fisher as a sexy escapologist? Check!

Really cool scene involving water tank, chains, padlocks and piranha? Check!

Major set piece later in the movie predicated on her escapology skills? D'oh!

Epic fail, all concerned; epic fail.

Now You See Me

Cineworld held a mystery film screening this evening, whipping up publicity by posting a series of downright oblique clues via Twitter. Messageboards were abuzz with speculation: many thought ‘Pacific Rim’, others plumbed for ‘The Lone Ranger’; when we booked the tickets, my wife was holding out for ‘The Wolverine’ while I had my fingers crossed for ‘The World’s End’. Ultimately, we were both disappointed. But at least it wasn’t two hours of CGI robots twatting aliens and then twatting each other. As we queued – interminably – I put a comment on FB to the effect that if it was ‘Pacific Rim’, I was going home.

We ended up not going home … well, not till the movie was over. We’d already agreed on the Half Hour Rule (if neither of us are digging a film at the half hour, we cut our losses and blow the joint). By minute thirty of ‘Now You See Me’, we were both enjoying it. By the time it was over, though, we had mixed feelings.

‘Now You See Me’ does several things right in very quick succession. It starts with a voiceover warning the audience that the closer they look, they less likely they’ll be to spot the trick. At the same time, a simple card trick plays out. The camera forces a very specific card on the viewer. It’s kind of a flipside to the opening of ‘The Prestige’. Where Christopher Nolan’s film clues you in to the three stages of an illusion, ‘Now You See Me’ deliberately sets out to obfuscate. It’s both a ballsy stroke of legerdemain and a self-defeating act: the longer ‘Now You See Me’ goes on, the more evident it is that director Louis Letterier wants his film to be a ‘Prestige’ for the Jerry Bruckheimer generation. But whereas ‘The Prestige’ has a genuine weighty human drama to anchor its more fanciful elements, ‘Now You See Me’ trades solely in the fanciful.

But let’s skip back to its opening reel. Having pulled a beautifully executed fast one on the audience, Letterier assembles his quartet of prestidigitatorial protagonists with superb economy, dealing out their vignettes like cards: street magician with a tendency to the theatrical J Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), hypnotist/shakedown artist Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson), glamorous escapologist Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher), and new kid on the block Jack Wilder (Dave Franco). The narrative flings them together and has them pulled into the scheme of an unknown benefactor so quickly – the title card is a perfectly-timed punchline to the whole sequence – that their ineffably stupid names didn’t even begin to annoy me till a good halfway into the movie.

In equally quick succession, our foursome have been reimagined as a sell-out Vegas act who make headlines (and get themselves arrested) on account of an illusion based around a bank robbery. What pisses off the authorities, and gets Interpol newbie Alma Dray (Melanie Laurent) assigned to assisting rumpled sourpuss detective Dylan Rhodes (Mark Ruffalo) – this really is That Movie Where Really Talented People Play Really One-Dimension Characters With Really Stupid Names – is the disappearance of a fuckton of Euros from a Parisian bank that tallies exactly with the magic trick.

The rest of the movie – or at least, the 75% of it that conspires to make you take your eye off the ball prior to the big reveal – is essentially Dylan and Alma vs. The Four Horsemen (thus the collective name the illusionists bill themselves as, notwithstanding that one of them is a woman), while vengeful impresario Arthur Tressler (Michael Caine) and professional debunker Thaddeus Bradley (Morgan Freeman) hover in the wings nursing their own agendas.

‘Now You See Me’ is magnificently entertaining for a big chunk of its running time. Less than an hour in, I decided not to bother trying to second guess and just enjoy the ride. I’m glad I took that approach, because the whole improbably contrived plot pays off in a manner that, while not disappointing or in any way a cheat, is a little underwhelming. The essential problem with making a film about magic is that magic is a con. It’s smoke and mirrors; razzle dazzle; misdirection. It’s all surface and when you think about it too much, you dismiss it – rightly – as bullshit. ‘The Prestige’ is only superficially about magic – the real point of the film is the cost of the illusion; what you have to sacrifice to accomplish the seemingly impossible. To a lesser degree, Neil Burger’s ‘The Illusionist’ sets out its box of tricks as a backdrop to a tale of romance. ‘Now You See Me’ is entirely about the illusion, and as such starts to vaporise in a fog of its own insubstantiality the moment the end credits roll.