What is Nocturnal Animals thinking

I once saw an interview with James Cameron where he described filmmaking by leveling his hands at his nose and forehead, highlighting his eyes. “It’s all right here,” he said. If you can relay what your character is feeling to your audience, you’ve got it made.

In Nocturnal Animals we come to understand the depth of a character’s emotion without ever looking in his eyes. Edward Schiff has mailed a novel he’s written to his ex-wife, wealthy art gallery owner Susan Morrow (Amy Adams). She hasn’t seen him in decades and as she reads his yet-to-be-published book we grow to know Edward through 20-year-old flashbacks and, more completely, through his work. In an effective technique, writer/director (and fashion mogul?!) Tom Ford, who based this screenplay off a 1993 novel, shows us Edward’s story-within-a-story as Susan reads it. It’s immediately obvious that the novel’s lead, Tony Hastings, is Edward’s alter-ego and the story is an allegory for the life Edward and Susan once had together (both Edward and Tony are played by Jake Gyllenhaal, and Tony’s wife by Amy Adams doppelgänger Isla Fischer). As the novel sets on a dark, violent path, with Tony failing to act as his wife and daughter are abducted, raped and murdered by a gang of thugs, we can guess that Edward and Susan’s failed marriage suffered its own haunting tragedy.

What happened between them? The movie keeps us in suspense as Susan, now trapped in a hollow marriage shaded with regret, drops hints: “I didn’t have faith in him,” she says about Edward. “I panicked and I did something horrible to him, something unforgivable… I left him in a brutal way.” As she reads on, Tony’s quest for the thugs who killed his family parallels flashbacks to Susan and Edward’s own relationship, which begins as a hopelessly romantic love story before Susan grows wary of Edward’s humble creative failings. Their conflict is crystallized in an argument over whether Edward is “weak,” a trait mirrored in Tony’s failure to prevent his family from being abducted. (In case we didn’t make the connection on our own, at one point Edward explains to Susan, “Nobody writes about anything but themselves.”) So it’s no coincidence that as Tony Hastings again succumbs to weakness Susan’s unforgivable act is finally revealed: after Tony fails to capitalize on the chance to kill the thugs, letting them run free, Susan not only leaves Edward for another man but has their child aborted. As Tony shouts “I should have stopped it! I should have stopped it!” over and over, we can picture Edward typing the words, haunted by his failure to preserve his marriage and unborn child.

What's left after that emotional sledgehammer? Resolution. Twenty years later, has Edward overcome these demons? The answer’s not found in his novel, which is drenched in ambiguity as Tony musters the strength to kill the thug only to be blinded in the confrontation before accidentally shooting himself dead. Susan, who has fallen back in love with Edward over the course of reading his work, needs more than that and so do we. So she sets up a dinner. And as we watch her sit silently in the restaurant waiting for Edward to arrive — first for a minute, then two, praying the credits won’t hit — our minds run with possibilities as the realization he’s not coming dawns. Was the novel his catharsis, allowing him to finally outgrow his weakness and let go of Susan? Was it was an act of revenge? (The word is not-so-subtly emblazoned on the wall in Susan’s gallery in an earlier scene.) Did he ceremoniously commit suicide? Speculation is fruitless — all that’s definitive in Nocturnal Animals are themes contrasting materialism with fulfillment and the value of creative self-expression (including shrewd lines like “Do you know what it feels like to put yourself out on the line creatively and then have someone that you love tell you they don’t understand it?”) Otherwise the experience is reminiscent of David Chase’s famed ending to The Sopranos, which also left me feeling starkly deprived before I eventually gained appreciation at not getting any answers. Like Edward’s alter-ego, we’re blind before we go.