What is the new Tom Ford movie, “Nocturnal Animals,” meant to be about? I have seen it twice now, and am none the wiser second time around. At its core is Susan (Amy Adams), a gallery owner with an austere haircut and a savage dose of insomnia. Her makeup could have been done by a mortician. She lives in Los Angeles with her second husband (Armie Hammer), whom she occasionally meets at breakfast. The gates to their home are forged from polished steel, and a Jeff Koons balloon sculpture sits forlornly in the back yard. Anyone whose idea of a screen marriage is the one between William Powell and Myrna Loy, in “The Thin Man,” should stay clear.
One day, Susan receives a package. (She gets a paper cut from opening it, poor soul, and her assistant has to finish the job.) Inside is the manuscript of a novel by her first husband, Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal), whom she last saw nineteen years ago, when he was still a struggling writer. Donning a pair of spectacles slightly larger than welder’s goggles, she settles down to read, and at once we are spirited into the tale that Edward tells. This unfolds in a very different landscape—the badlands of West Texas, where a middle-class family is forced off the road, at night, by leering hooligans, who abduct the wife and the daughter, and leave the husband stranded and tormented in the scrub. The incident does not end well. Over the next year, thanks to a local policeman in a white Stetson, the villains are traced, and justice, of the most basic variety, is served.
Now and then, during the Texan trauma, we cut back to Susan, who keeps gasping or dropping the manuscript when she gets to a scary bit. Would it be pedantic to point out that this is not how people actually read a book? The movie wants to suggest that the experience of reading is just like watching a movie—a flat-out lie, cunningly concealed by Ford as he stitches together the two parts of his story. Tony, for instance, the husband in the book, is also played by Jake Gyllenhaal, sometimes sporting a beard to distinguish him from Edward, and whenever Tony takes a shower or a bath Susan does the same, as if to scrub off the shock of the novel. Thus do the facts of her life interweave with fiction. Had she picked up “Pride and Prejudice” instead, she would have found herself strangely compelled to dance the cotillion with a snooty man in breeches.
But wait, there is more weaving to come. Flashbacks return us to a younger Susan encountering a younger Edward in a snowy Manhattan, dining with him, and then—always a tricky moment in any relationship—trying to be nice about his creative efforts. “I think you should write about something other than yourself,” she says. “Everybody writes about themselves,” he replies. They do? “Nocturnal Animals” certainly cleaves to that solipsistic view. Susan cannot imagine Edward’s new novel without casting him, beard or no beard, as the hapless hero, and there is a cogent, though not very original, case for proposing that the whole darned thing, Texas and all, is simply a bad dream that squirms in Susan’s unsleeping brain. I was half expecting Bobby Ewing, from “Dallas,” to step into the shower beside her and ask for the soap.
My suspicion is that there’s a lot less to “Nocturnal Animals” than meets the eye. True, it’s quite a meeting; the contrast of the cloud-capped heavens above the desert and the velvet darkness of Los Angeles, rubbed by the lush harmonies of Abel Korzeniowski’s score, makes the film every inch as seductive as Ford’s début, “A Single Man” (2009). What everyone remembers of that movie, however, is Colin Firth on the phone, holding back a tide of grief as he learns of a lover’s death, and it must be said that nothing in the new work can top such a surge of feeling. Michael Shannon is reliably hard-bitten as the cop, but too many of the Texas scenes, with Aaron Taylor-Johnson overdoing it as the main thug, carry a nasty whiff of the ersatz—an art-house fantasy of the redneck. I felt sorry for Gyllenhaal, berated in both his personae for being weak, and for Adams, strapped and laced into a role that scarcely lets her breathe. As for the news that Susan and her moneyed kind are frustrated by the vacuum of their existence (“No one really likes what they do,” a friend says), tell me something I didn’t learn from Visconti and Antonioni half a century ago. The best thing in this gleaming and self-enraptured picture is a five-minute cameo from Laura Linney, as Susan’s mother, dryly informing her daughter, over a Martini, that all women turn into their mothers: “Just you wait.”
The ranking of actors is a dangerous game. To prefer one to another is to heed an impulse that we can barely explain, but to crank up that preference into a principle—let alone a definitive list—is asking for trouble. Nonetheless, the stubborn fact remains that some dramatic careers impress themselves upon us more than others, with an unignorable force. To follow the arc described by Isabelle Huppert, for instance, from her breakout role, in “The Lacemaker” (1977), to her new movie, “Elle,” is to ask yourself, year after year, how someone so at ease with the blazing extremes of emotion can also prove so adept at preserving her cool. It is as if she were guarding secrets that no plot can plumb. Who else can match that mystery?
One answer would be Meryl Streep, and in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, as Huppert collaborated with Godard, Chabrol, and Maurice Pialat, Streep enjoyed a stupendous run, from “The Deer Hunter” to “Silkwood” and “Cry in the Dark.” Jump to this century, though, and as Streep has fronted films barely worthy of her genius, such as “Mamma Mia!” and “The Iron Lady,” or creaky adaptations of plays, like “Doubt” and “August: Osage County,” Huppert has continued to seek out, or to be courted by, the major directors she deserves—François Ozon, Claire Denis, and, triumphantly, Michael Haneke, for “The Piano Teacher” and “Amour.” (She has also found time to play Hedda Gabler and Medea onstage.) Streep is now sixty-seven, Huppert four years younger, and while both, by a pleasing coincidence, provided the voice—one in English, the other in French—of the vulpine wife in Wes Anderson’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” their recent histories reinforce the lament that American actresses of a certain age are ill-served, in comparison with their European rivals, by the medium that they grace. A lack of strong roles, for any performer, can quell the habit of audacity. Hence, perhaps, the sly remark of Paul Verhoeven, the director of “Elle,” who has said, “No American actress would take on such an amoral movie.”
Being Verhoeven, of course, he would say that. The man who made “Basic Instinct” has never avoided a chance to stir up contention, and “Elle,” written by David Birke, is no exception. While the screen is still black, at the start, we hear a rape in progress, and the opening shot is of a cat, studiedly pondering the deed. The victim is Michèle Leblanc (Huppert), a divorcée who dwells alone in an elegant house, shuttered like a country retreat, in a Paris suburb; the shutters will have a part to play, swinging and banging during a storm as if to remind us, and Michèle, how poorly protected her bourgeois fortress is. Yet she could not be calmer. In the wake of the crime, with the perpetrator—a masked intruder—having left, she sweeps up broken glass, throws away the clothes that she wore, and observes with catlike interest the blood that stains the foam, above her groin, when she takes a bath. She has herself checked for sexually transmitted diseases but neglects to contact the police, as if there were nothing to be done. When she does tell friends in a restaurant about the assault, they are startled and stunned. Michèle saves them from embarrassment: “Let’s order,” she says.
This is Huppert territory at its most unsparing. Listen to Michèle recounting a gruesome episode from her childhood to a horrified neighbor. At the end of her recitation, she smiles and says to him, “Not bad, eh?” The film, however glossy, is a string of brutalities. The rape occurs more than once, though whether we are watching repeated flashbacks or a fresh assault is unclear. What is beyond doubt is the scheming suavity with which Huppert arms her character; seldom has the famous French moue been put to such withering use. Michèle maintains her carnal chutzpah—sleeping with her best friend’s husband, rubbing a stockinged foot against the neighbor’s leg, at dinner—and buys a hammer, to lay beside her pillow, as if she were choosing a perfume. In short, she makes the heroine of “Nocturnal Animals” look like a wimp. The fact that the rapist’s identity is revealed well before the finale is no accident, for Michèle is not merely visiting revenge upon a single sadist but, you sense, rebuking a society that would like to regard her as nothing but helpless prey. That stance of hers will outrage many viewers, as Verhoeven intends it to, but the question of whether “Elle” is pernicious nonsense or an excruciating black comedy is brushed aside in Huppert’s demonstration of sangfroid. This, she shows us, is how to stand up for yourself in style. She’s the best. ♦
