Why 'Nocturnal Animals' has one of the worst scripts of the decade ('The Room' sans laughs)

To quote another Aaron Taylor-Johnson character, 'Didn't see that coming', eh? Well let's look at 10 of the worst written lines, moments, characters, in the horribly misguided film that is Nocturnal Animals. I'm not even going to talk about the artistic choices in ill-taste (that perfume ad massacre scene), or that godawful jump scare that came out of nowhere as a shameless attempt to emulate a 100000000000 times better film, Mulholland Drive. I will say, though, that I might have called it worst picture of 2016 too soon, because I haven't re-watched Suicide Squad or I Saw the Light, and will probably never see Yoga Hosers and Collateral Beauty till their CinemaSins videos comes out.

It goes full-out The Room with its dialogue at points. 'Well when you love someone you work things out. You don’t just throw it away. You have to be careful with it. You might never get it back.' (around 1:27 in the trailer above) It might be the way these lines are delivered, it might be the way the scene's being directed, either way when I watched it the first time these lines already struck me as downright awful and on-the-nose. Out of context, this line already seems like laboured, strained writing. And yes, before one calls me out on it being intentional satire, and intentionally phony, this is meant to be a moment where the characters are communicating something genuine, from deep inside their heart to one another. Instead, Jake comes across as kind of like Lou Bloom in Nightcrawler, but only because he seems to have no understanding of human emotions, he's not as compelling as even a strand of Lou Bloom's hair. You can imagine Tommy Wiseau delivering these lines with aplomb and concluding it with a resounding 'You're Tearing Me Apart Lisa!'

In fact, most of the scenes where Jake Gyllenhaal's Edward and Amy Adams's Susan are just downright awful in terms of the writing behind them. The way they're inserted into the film is of course extremely problematic (both story lines always keep slowing down one another by the way the editing pieces them together), as the flashbacks never feel as seamlessly integrated into the plot as say, Manchester by the Sea and Silence do with their flashbacks. And on that note, everything characters say just feel jarring and hamfisted. The way characters just seem to spout of character descriptions about their life verbatim, without anything resembling a natural interaction. Again, even if this is satire, you need to generate some sort of connection between the characters.

Again. He called me a 'Nocturnal Animal'. The film is called 'Nocturnal Animals'. Cue trying to explain the film's themes and deliver a neat bit of exposition seamlessly along the way. No one will suspect a thing. Screw subtlety, am I right? Now in terms of the 'unnaturalness' of the dialogue, I understand it's to do with subjectivity as well, but hear me out here. Carol, last year, bears some resemblance to Nocturnal Animals in that it's centred so much on a particularly stylized style of dialogue, and characters saying things with a hint of artifice. But that film also relied so much on silence and silent expressions to convey meaning beyond words, and also I never felt the dialogue was unnatural, people probably never talked that way, but the way it flowed between characters and actors reigns supreme over the awkward way any form of social interaction in Nocturnal Animals is handled. Speaking of awkward, when will directors learn that showing one person taking a shower, then showing another person lying in a bathtub isn't terribly clever? Not to mention that it's the most forced, unnatural and unnecesssary bathtub scene in a year when Batman v.s. Superman came out (oh, featuring Amy Adams too, thank you Dennis Villeneuve for giving her something good to be in this year).

I don't want to pick out specific culprits, but Armie Hammer, already a bit of a bland actor in general outside of The Social Network and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. suffers from some pretty cringe-worthy 'flirty' lines, Amy Adams' 'real' daughter (though every character in the story outside of Aaron Taylor-Johnson's Ray and Michael Shannon's Bobby Andes feels pretty artificial) character gets one scene that feels completely out of place to utter some meaningless tripe, and a series of cameos by the talented Michael Sheen, Jena Malone, and Andrea Riseborough all handle some 'satirical' dialogue in a truly cba fashion.

At this point in time, the only two positive elements about Nocturnal Animals

Speaking of Taylor-Johnson and Shannon, I still stand by both performances as being strong performances, particularly Taylor-Johnson, who actually manages to make moments in his final confrontation scene rather bone-chilling. Shannon handles his standard Texan detective dialect well, he's always good in everything, although I've come to consider him the weakest memeber of an admittedly very strong 2016 Best Supporting Actor squad. Notably, most of the scenes with these two that excel are nearly silent. Shannon's glaring eyes and incisive staredowns of potential culprits to a murder do have a rather viscreal effect. Taylor-Johnson's final scenes, as aforementioned, are actualyl pretty sleazy, lowdown trashy stuff that verges on being quite great. Ford should've taken note; maybe the film would've worked with a more pared down screenplay, some crisper editing, and a more balanced view of the central 'conflict' of the 'real' part of the film.

Which brings me to the inherent misogyny of the film, beautifully brought to life by the screenplay. I'll say nothing about how the film reduces Adams, who gave the best cinematic performance of 2016 in Arrival, to a series of pensive, scared, shocked, horrified 'my god' expressions to reading a horrible, horrible novels (which raises the question, how was it ever published?). I've never been a big Adams fan in general, and it's a shame that in the year she gave what with time might become one of my favourite best Actress performances of the 21st Century, might have gotten some votes shaven off her Arrival campaign by her performance here. Anyway, despite all that, I find that Adams comes away giving perhaps the third best perfomance in the film. She has to interact with some of the worst co-stars, most notably LAURA LINNEY, who's over-the-top yet unbearably bland performance as a mother who warning her daughter against the future, states 'You may not realize it but you and I are a lot more alike than you think...WE ALL EVENTUALLY TURN INTO OUR MOTHERS', thanks again for spelling something you hamfistedly try to show movie. You can go back about 57 years ago to Anthony Perkins's 'A boy's best friend is his mother' to find a more natural sounding, masterfully handled line about mother-children parallels, and that was delivered by a (SPOILERS) rather mentally unbalanced fella (SPOILERS) whereas here it's meant to be a mother giving her daughter some advice. I'd say The Room comes off even better than Nocturnal Animals in this regard.

And the ending. The film places the whole onus of everything bad that's happened, all the horrors of the novel, all of Jake Gyllenhaal's pain and suffering after being dumped by Amy Adams, Which okay, fine, her character is no angel, in fact she's done a lot of bad things, made a lot of mistakes, but the ending seems to imply that Edward's been wronged all along by her mistreatment of him. Sorry to break it to you, guys, but Edward's a nasty piece of work as well. The writing in the scenes where Edward is discussing ideas about his novel are some of the most poorly handled scenes in the film. It attempts to give us insight into a struggling artist and how Susan's failure to support him properly by giving him false encouragement is making her 'sound like [her] mother'. From this point in the film we leap to the relationship completely disintegrating, and Edward's declarations that they are 'perfect together' not only ring completely false, they sound absolutely demented which I'm sure was not the intention. The film wants us to have sympathy for Edward, but how can we? He's a complete putz. Then Edward's final scene where he silently starres her down in the rain after she's performed a supposedly unforgivable act just felt utterly hollow and in ill-taste. Edward, if his novel is anything to go by, compares the pain of his betrayal to that of having a wife and daughter raped and murdered, without ever taking into account that he may be susceptible to blame. I'm not going to lie, I'm kind of glad I had to re-watch this for my Oscar rankings. It removed the mask that tried to find positive things to talk about the film and exposed me to how deeply flawed it is overall.