Tag: The Neon Demon

Nocturnal Animals Movie Review

Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals is centered on a woman living in a fancy world surrounded by her own boredom and regret at certain life choices. The film is an often fascinating mash-up of Hitchcock, a little De Palma inspired Hitchcock, and most surprisingly, a West Texas crime tale that looks and feels like this year’s earlier Hell or High Water. We also have a more conventional tale of a romance gone astray and the emotions involved with that. It’s a concoction that sometimes is a little messy, a tad campy at moments, veers in tone shifts, and is also directed a fashion designer who seems to know exactly what he wishes to fashion.

L.A. art gallery owner Susan Morrow (Amy Adams) is living a wealthy life in an unhappy marriage and a career she’s grown to believe is purposeless. One day, she receives a manuscript. It’s from her ex-husband Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal) that she was only married to for a couple years around college. The novel grabs her. It’s the aforementioned High Water looking story of a remarried Edward on a West Texas road trip with his wife and daughter when they are terrorized by bad guys led by a disheveled and effectively menacing Aaron Taylor-Johnson. Their encounter takes a dark and tragic turn and soon Edward is teaming up with a ranger (Michael Shannon, in a terrific performance) to deal with its aftermath.

The story cuts back and forth between the actions of Susan’s ex-flame’s West Texas narrative (is it real or not?) and her unhappy life on the West Coast. We also witness the courtship of them in college. This juxtaposition creates an often dream like quality (a little David Lynch thrown in for good measure) and it’s rather intoxicating. We basically get to know everything we need to know about Susan’s character in a great short scene with Laura Linney as her debutante mom. Other key characters and their motivations don’t become clear until later.

Nocturnal Animals looks gorgeous as you might expect from a designer that Jay-Z made a song about. The cinematography is stunning and the musical score is often reminiscent of something we’d hear in an old Hitch pic or perhaps De Palma homage. There are moments that recall Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon in plot had that movie actually succeeded. Tom Ford wears his influences proudly and unabashedly in his sophomore effort. It’s anything but boring.

***1/2 (out of four)

The Neon Demon Movie Review

Five years ago, Nicolas Winding Refn made Drive, one of my absolute favorite pictures in years. The ultra stylish and occasionally extremely violent action thriller was light on plot, but heavy on atmosphere. I found it hypnotic. I was less enamored with Only God Forgives, the filmmaker’s follow-up two years later. Violent and fascinating to look at? Indeed it was and it had some good stuff in it. Yet I wrote at the time that it lacked soul and that’s something Drive had with the relationship between Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan.

Now we arrive at The Neon Demon and that whole soulless thing pervades this experience even more so. Elle Fanning stars as Jesse, fresh out of some small town and in Los Angeles to become a model. She’s sixteen, but tells everyone she’s 19. Jesse is stunningly beautiful and knows it. So does everyone around her and it infects them with feelings of jealousy and lust. This includes two other models (Abbey Lee and Bella Heathcote) and a makeup artist (Jena Malone) who befriends our wide eyed beauty for a while. Then there’s the photographer (Karl Glusman) who has the hots for her and the manager of the fleabag motel (Keanu Reeves) she’s staying at that might, too.

The central concept of The Neon Demon is that being gorgeous can get you somewhere in life, but it can be dangerous as well due to how it affects others. We pretty much get that within the first 15 minutes and then Demon just keeps going. And going. Anyone familiar with the director knows he favors style over substance and there are some technically pleasing shots to behold. Drive had an interesting enough story to go with the tone and visuals. Forgives did some of the time. This mostly doesn’t. It’s an ugly film about beautiful people.

I found myself simply not caring where the plot went and atmospherics weren’t enough to hold my attention. Nor were the performances. None are bad, but none really rise above the material. The final act gives us a tone shift that may you have you either rolling your eyes or trying to keep your lunch down. We’ve come a long way from the thrill I felt awaiting Refn’s next picture after Drive. With Demon, he seems stuck in reverse.

*1/2 (out of four)