The altercation escalates and results in Tony lost in the desert searching for the family heвЂ™s not sure if he abandoned or not. Driving through a remote part of Texas at night with no cell service, the family is railroaded by three thugs in a muscle car ( Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Karl Glusman, Rob AramayoВ - all surprisingly good at being as ugly on the inside as they are pretty on the outside). The story of the book follows Tony (played, as imagined by Susan, by Gyllenhaal), his teenaged daughter India ( Ellie Bamber) and his wife (played by Isla Fisher, which if youвЂ™re following, basically makes Isla Fisher the actor Amy Adams would cast as the genre version of herself, which, well actually, bravo). You canвЂ™t help but wish Ford had just made this film instead. However, some of us happen to love Jim Thompson-style pulp paperbacks and surprisingly Tom Ford appears to be one of our number, because the film-within-the-film (which is actually the film Susan imagines as she reads the book) is terrific: a grimy genre b-movie elevated especially by ShannonвЂ™s barnstorming, funny, and ferocious performance. Susan reads the book, and unlike EdwardвЂ™s previous work that she dismissed, she finds it gripping and brilliant, and also troubling in its parallels to their shared history.Д®dwardвЂ™s prose styling must be pretty amazing, because otherwise itвЂ™s hard to believe that Susan, with her immaculate taste and casual ability to separate Good Art from Bad Art, would have her mind so changed by a novel of EdwardвЂ™s that amounts (when visualized anyway) to a Jim Thompson-style pulp paperback. He sends her a proof, despite their having had no contact for 19 years. So much so that her grad-school first husband Edward ( Jake Gyllenhaal) called her a вЂњnocturnal animal,вЂќ the plural form of which is the title of his new book, which is dedicated to Susan. Susan is a lifelong sufferer from insomnia, the sexiest and most depth-implying ailment to which the upper echelons of society are prone. This is how we can gauge the level of her disaffection, because we all know that having to sell your Jeff Koons Balloon Dog is the absolute worst. She goes to parties that seem to have been held in Panem from вЂњ The Hunger GamesвЂќ ( Michael SheenвЂs lilac jacket!), and doesnвЂ™t even care that theyвЂ™re going broke and she has to sell her art collection.

The first, the meta-story is of Susan ( Amy Adams), a successful artist living a life of disaffected luxury with her husband Hutton, played by Armie Hammer who so glows with the accrued luminescence of generations of upper-crust white-guy entitlement that you are stunned by his physical perfection every time heвЂ™s onscreen and instantly forget he exists every time heвЂ™s not. Because while youвЂ™re in there, in the moment, while editor Joan Sobel is stringing together DP Seamus McGarveyвЂs glossy impressions of beautiful people, and production and costume design so fetishistically exquisite you might occasionally choke on your own saliva, itвЂ™s fun that comes in two different flavors. All of that was for that?Д«ut no real matter that it gives us little of substance to leave the theater with. His bid for consequence is where the film becomes inconsequential: a longwinded, thoroughly entertaining anecdote told to account, ultimately, for one deliberately missed connection. ItвЂ™s a bifurcated film, and so perhaps a bifurcated reaction is to be expected, but after so much drama, all the violent deaths, all the heavy-rimmed glasses, all the designer bathtubs, all the beautiful male forms, all that bitten-off art-world chatter, all that Michael Shannon being the greatest thing ever (again, but this time in a Stetson), FordвЂ™s attempt to synthesize the two halves of his film into a coherent whole is what sells it all short. ItвЂ™s also highly enjoyable, when itвЂ™s not trying to be serious and make heavy points about the interrelation of art and life. From its opening titles, a seeming riff on a James Bond credits sequence in which naked, overweight-to-obese ladies dance in slow motion wearing nothing but majorette-style accessories while glitter flies through the air and Abel KorzeniowskiвЂs shamelessly romance-and-intrigue-based score swirls and swoops deliriously, Tom FordвЂs вЂњ Nocturnal AnimalsвЂќ is a feast for the eyes and a fun-size Mars Bar for the brain.

Nocturnal animals ending explained