![]() There are, of course, resonances among the strands. I’m not giving much away by noting that Susan’s judgmental, high-society mom doesn’t turn out to have been so wrong after all. Through a steady drumbeat of flashbacks, we also learn what happened to Susan and Edward’s earlier relationship and drove them apart. (Quite a bit of this movie involves watching Amy Adams quietly reading a book, and that’s genuinely hypnotic.) This fictional narrative - what happened to Tony’s wife and child, and the involvement of a gruff, tough-talking Texas lawman (Michael Shannon, broad and gruff and hilarious) - eventually takes over the movie, with Ford milking every bit of suspense from the tragic, enraging tale. Reading in the tub, in the bed, in the living room, Susan is pulled further and further into the horrific turns of Edward’s novel. “He is a romantic, but he is also fragile … The things you love about him now are the things you’ll hate in a few years.” “He is too weak for you,” we see her unforgiving mother (Laura Linney) warn over a martini lunch. This is the third strand looking back on their brief, doomed romance, she recalls how her wealthy, conservative Texas family didn’t want her marrying him. ![]() As Susan reads all this, enraptured, she’s reminded of her early days with Edward, whom she’d known since they were kids. The men - led by preening, psychotic good ol’ boy Ray (an unrecognizable Aaron Taylor-Johnson) - first terrorize and toy with the family, then beat Tony and take the two women away. The book he’s written offers the second strand, telling the grisly story of Tony (Gyllenhaal, again), a Texas man who’s on a road trip with his beautiful wife Laura (Isla Fisher) and teenage daughter India (Ellie Bamber) when they’re accosted by a carload of rednecks on an empty stretch of highway in West Texas. The film, based on Austin Wright’s novel Tony and Susan, unfolds in three interlocking strands: Fancy-pants gallery owner Susan Morrow (Amy Adams), living a life of chilly comfort with her unfaithful husband Hutton (Armie Hammer), receives the manuscript of a novel written by her ex Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal). That’s not always a bad thing there’s a perverse elegance to so much artistic firepower being used to produce such a modest effect. Its aesthetic footprint is huge, but its impact decidedly small scale. ![]() Tom Ford has entirely overstuffed his nesting-doll domestic drama-cum-thriller Nocturnal Animals, and yet I spent much of the film worrying that it might not have a point.
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