"Nocturnal Animals" (3 stars out of 4)

Nocturnal Animals

3 stars out of 4

Every aspect of Nocturnal Animals is carefully orchestrated. Every shot is composed to perfection. Every bit of makeup is meant to say something about that character and their mindset. Symbolism in every frame. It is the kind of film where you spend considerable amount of time thinking about what the filmmaker was trying to show through this extravagant presentation. The unfortunate thing is that it doesn’t seem like producer/writer/director Tom Ford had all that much to say. That doesn’t mean Nocturnal Animals isn’t a gorgeous, intriguing, and riveting film. It just means that the more layers you unravel, the less it has to show.

Susan Morrow (Amy Adams) is an artist who is completely detached from her art. Her marriage is falling apart and she seems to lack direction. When a book written by her ex-husband is delivered, she is pulled from her listlessness into the world he has created. In the book, Tony Hastings and his family(Jake Gyllenhaal) is terrorized by motorists in rural Texas. As the story unravels, Susan is pulled deeper and deeper into the violence of the novel. The lines between the novel and Susan’s reality start to blur as the book begins to conjure up incidents from her past.

If Nocturnal Animals is anything, it is calculated. From the first frame, Tom Ford has complete control over every aspect of the story and how it is presented. Ford and director of photography Seamus McGarvey have created some gorgeous images that give the whole film the dream-like appearance necessary to bridge the fiction inside the fiction. Abel Korzeniowski’s score supplies the last needed coat of sheen on the whole beautiful presentation. There is not one moment of Nocturnal Animals that isn’t riveting. Like the page-turner the film features, one is always wondering where the filmmakers will take you the stories next.

In terms of performances, the film offers another stellar job by Michael Shannon. Shannon plays a small-town sheriff who has dark ways of helping out Hastings. However, It is almost as if Shannon received a different version of the script though as he seems to be the only actor who is playing his character as a darkly comedic performance. While his performance partially breaks the tone of the rest of the film, it has an unusual element helps both alleviate tension and discomfort us further. With one carefully orchestrated stare, Shannon makes us wonder why we don’t mind the horrible things he says and maybe wonder why we are snickering at them. Gyllenhaal continues to play the “calm man who becomes angry” role he has mastered in Zodiac, Prisoners, and Nightcrawler. When he switches between the two, it is a welcome and comfortable feeling that he sells as well as he always has. Adams plays cold and calculated well, although she seems to be given little to do besides look despondent and detached.

The problem with Nocturnal Animals is that it desperately wants to give off the appearance that it has something profound to share. Aristic slow-motion shots ask the viewer to look at every pixel of the image to pull in the meaning. Throughout the film, Lengthy shots of naked bodies are meant to correlate with similar images previously shown. Ford goes so far as to have giant pieces of art on the walls of Susan’s office in an attempt to connect her world and the world of the book. When the film comes to a puzzling and unexpected ending, viewers are going to have a lot of to talk about. I wrestled with the images, symbolism, and interweaving storylines for Nocturnal Animals for multiple days until I realized that it really didn’t have much to say. It is never boring and always captivating, yet left me empty. It is a gorgeous outfit with parts that aren’t stitched well. It is a type of movie that might be further ruined by close examination rather than strengthened.

The “story inside of the story” is also just not well-written. It plays like your standard Straw Dogs meets Deliverance story where a nice and calm man is thrust into a world of terror and violence. Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays the sadistic leader of the group. Although any moment he is on screen is filled with immense suspense, the whole thing still comes off like something we’ve seen before in lesser exploitation films. Something so seemingly refined as Nocturnal Animals would seem to be above this cliche. The fact that Adams’s Morrow is so pulled in by the story is odd. That all said, maybe the weakness of the second story is intentional and meant to not be the shining work of art Morrow believes it to be.

These complaints aside, Nocturnal Animals is never anything less than interesting. Although we may have seen this story before, we have never seen it look this astonishing. The film might not be quite as daring and brilliant as it thinks it is, but like any piece of art you stop and stare at, you are still going to take something from it.

"Patriots Day" (2.5 stars out of 4)

Patriots Day

(2.5 stars out of 4)

With 2013’s Lone Survivor and this year’s Deepwater Horizon, director Peter Berg seems to have cornered the market on real-life disaster films based on recent events. The fact that both star Mark Wahlberg seems only logical to maintain continuity. Berg and Wahlberg continue this trend with Patriots Day, the story of the events surrounding the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings. Much like Lone Survivor, Patriots Day hits the right notes needed to tell a tense real-life story but is severely limited because of clumsy dialogue.

Police officer Tommy Saunders (Mark Wahlberg) is working security at the finish line of the 2013 Boston Marathon. After terrorists (Alex Wolff and Themo Melikidze) place and detonate two bombs near the finish line, the city of Boston starts the process of finding and capturing those who are responsible for the explosions. Saunders and the FBI try to make sense of the destruction, all while the terrorists plan out their next attack.

One of the most surprising aspects of Patriots Day is the restraint that Berg shows in the execution of such recent and devastating events. The attack and the story around it could have easily have been presented in a truly ham-fisted and tactless way, with graphic violence delivered in hyper-kinetic editing with a soaring and mournful score. One of the most refreshing aspects of the film is that it doesn’t feel exploitative. While Berg is not afraid to show the attack and the aftermath, it is much more of a means for setting up the following investigation. It is not the overly grotesque and melodramatic presentation that a lesser director would have offered. Berg has always had a skill with presenting suspense, action, and touching on the human elements found in that story. Like Lone Survivor, Berg isn’t trying to create a stylistic action movie. He is trying to tell the story of the real situation and how they impacted real people. That said, Berg should be commended for creating some truly tense situations. The cold and subtle presentation of the bombings gives it a sudden and unexpected feeling.

While Berg excels at suspense and realistic violence, unfortunately he falls flat in regards to the script. The dialogue in Patriots Day is jarringly tinny and artificial. When dealing with real people in such a recent story, it is vital to establish an emotional connection with the characters. Audiences need to be able to put themselves into the situation. It is difficult to truly connect to these characters as they come off more like caricatures of real-life people. If you didn’t already know that Bostonites love the Red Sox (and the very specific way to pronounce “Red Sox”) and dislike the New York Yankees, Patriots Day offers this as a way to build our connection to multiple characters. Other characters are built up with their interactions surrounding consuming Dunkin Donuts (going so far as to discuss drinks specifically served at Dunkin Donuts) or listening to Zac Brown Band. Any character below the age of 25 is given the most banal examples of what a real person would say. Any younger cast member who is not central to the plot is given little more to do than play video games or smoke weed. This makes it easy to question the characterizations we are seeing and distances the audience from the story. It hits a false note and breaks the reality that Berg achieves so effortlessly in the more tense moments.

Patriots Day also feels both overlong and rushed. In order to give enough time to truly connect to the many real-life people in the story, the manhunt aspects would need to be limited. In order to truly give weight to the crime drama elements, you need to sacrifice building your characters. Patriots Day tries to achieve both and as a result doesn’t effectively present either side. On top of that, we are given a 10-minute documentary addition at the end of the film about the real-life victims and the police that were a part of the investigation. Although it is great to see these people and makes the story feel even less exploitative, it does jerkingly pull us out of the film’s finale and feels unnecessarily long.

With more refined writing and dialogue, Patriots Day could have been a subtle and suspenseful presentation of a recent real-life tragedy. It could have showed of the real people as well as strength of a city in the response to a terrifying act. As it is, Patriots Day is an occasionally very good film that is brought down hard by the sloppy handling of the human elements. Berg again proves that he can create a great crime film but that he can’t quite make the drama stick.