NOCTURNAL ANIMALS 2016

Spoiler Alert. This is a critical essay, not a review. Many crucial plot points are 

revealed and referenced for the purpose of analysis. 

Amy Adams as Susan Morrow

“Do you ever feel like your life has turned into something you never intended?”

Susan Morrow is a successful Los Angeles art gallery owner who lives a life of lacquered, heavily-curated wealth in the kind of sterile, fortress-like compound Architectural Digest tries to convince us are homes. They’re domiciles, they're dwellings, but by no stretch of the imagination are they homes. Susan, who sports— or, more accurately, hides behind— a severe, vision-concealing hairdo, shares this steel and cement mausoleum with her model-perfect financier husband, Hutton (who looks precisely like what you’d imagine a man named Hutton would look like), along with several million dollars’ worth of art. Art for which Susan harbors little affection and must occasionally sell in order to keep up appearances while her husband’s business flounders.

Armie Hammer as Hutton Morrow

From the way she occupies space without actually inhabiting it and dresses in a cold, off-putting style best described as "hostile chic," we can tell that Susan is at some kind of crossroads. Often caught in moments of lost-in-thought stillness, Susan exhibits all the traits of suffering from the kind of well-upholstered midlife crisis that arises after career and creature comforts are secured and the “Am I happy?” dilemma begins to rear its head. But there's something more. It has to do with her past...and it's tearing Susan apart. 

"What right do I have not to be happy? I have everything. 
I feel ungrateful not to be happy."

Jake Gyllenhaal as Edward Sheffield/Tony Hastings

Into this environment of costly ennui arrives a manuscript that turns out to be the proofs of a soon-to-be-published novel by Susan’s ex-husband Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal), an aspiring writer she hasn’t seen or been in contact with for 19 years. In fact, their breakup was so acrimonious and hurtful (she left after secretly aborting their child and cheating on him with the “handsome and dashing” Hutton) that Edward never remarried, and all attempts by Susan to contact him have been met with his hanging up on her. (Side note - I mourn that future generations will never know the ecstasy of slamming down a phone receiver in anger.)

Michael Shannon as Bobby Andes

If the timing and arrival of this parcel weren’t already fraught with portent—delivered, significantly, by a shadowy figure driving a vintage, chocolate brown Mercedes—then certainly Susan suffering a this-can’t-be-a-good-omen paper cut while opening the package sets off plenty of additional existential alarms. However, the novel’s title “Nocturnal Animals” (a onetime term of endearment Edward had for his chronically insomniatic ex-wife), its dedication (“For Susan”), and an uncharacteristically genial note crediting her with inspiring him hint, perhaps, at the possibility of one of those well-timed, estranged couple reconciliations beloved of rom-coms.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Ray Marcus

But when Hutton leaves for a business meeting (monkey business, if you get my cruder meaning), Susan settles down to read her ex-husband's novel, only to find it a disturbing, brutally savage tale of violence, guilt, loss, and revenge. One that Susan interprets through the meaningless absurdity of her current life and the fractured, self-reproachful emotional prism of her past with Edward. 

Within the novel's sad, heart-wrenching story of a family destroyed by a nighttime confrontation on a desolate stretch of West Texas Interstate, Susan sees troubling real-life parallels. The more she reads, the more she fears that the allusions and thinly-veiled similarities are an allegorical, perhaps menacing, indictment of her relationship with Edward and her culpability in its dissolution. 

Laura Linney as Anne Sutton

“Susan, enjoy the absurdity of our world. It’s a lot less painful. 

And believe me, our world is a LOT less painful than the real world.”

Nocturnal Animals, written and directed by Tom Ford (only his second film, his first being the sensitive and touching A Single Man), is one of my new modern classics: a contemporary film with the heart and soul of a film made in the '70s.
I don't often write about contemporary films, but when I do (Closer, Blue Jasmine, Maps to the Stars, and Carnage), it's when they speak to me in a forceful, intimate voice reminiscent of my favorite films from the '60s and '70s. They tend to be difficult, character-driven scenarios dealing with the pain of interpersonal conflict, self-confrontation, and alienation. They're movies that, for me, illuminate the vicissitudes of human experience in ways that are challenging and poignant. People will write to me, curious as to why I'm drawn to films of intense emotional turmoil...often between complicated characters who are not altogether wholly sympathetic.

I like to think it's because I'm fundamentally a happy person blessed with a modest, good life and peace of mind. Peace of mind I attribute to the lessons learned from having endured and grown from my share of challenges and difficult times. While I'm no advocate for hardship as life's greatest teaching tool, speaking subjectively, none of the happiness I value in my life would have been possible without the time spent grappling with at least some pain and sadness. Since I respect this aspect of life, it seems to be a quality I gravitate toward and applaud when I see it addressed in film.

I like being reminded that life--the good and bad of it--is a thing to be experienced, not something one seeks to cocoon and insulate oneself from in pursuit of the emotional sterility of the unexamined existance.

The characters in Edward's novel are Tony & Laura Hastings (Gyllenhaal and Isla Fischer)

 and their daughter India (Elle Bamber).

Nocturnal Animals is structured as three simultaneously told stories. Present-day reality has Susan reading her ex's novel; flashbacks reveal her relationship with her first husband; and the third narrative is Susan's visualization of her husband's novel. Although the book is a work of fiction and not revealed to be a roman a clef, Susan nevertheless envisions the characters as looking like herself, Edward, and the daughter that she had with her 2nd husband. 

This raises the notion that the violent action of the novel is a metaphorical commentary on the reality-based parts of the film, while calling into question the reliability of Susan's perspective. Is she interpreting the novel through the same prism of guilt and emotional violence she uses when reflecting on her regrets of the past? 

Susan only smiles openly in images from her past

I was absolutely floored when I saw Nocturnal Animals. No, check that...Nocturnal Animals was a kick in the solar plexus. I was stunned. Like a good thriller should, its plot kept me in a near-constant state of agitation and anxiety, but the tension didn't emanate from the storyline(s) alone -EVERYTHING about the film sparked my emotional antennae. 

From the considered use of costuming to reveal character, the edge-of-your-seat sound design, the evocative use of decor, the music (Abel Korzeniowski's score sent chills down my spine)...all of it was pure bliss for me. I love it when a movie can create an entire world onscreen, and in the world of Nocturnal Animals, so much is going on and so many messages are being communicated that a certain alert attentiveness is required.  I was thoroughly worn out by the time the film was over. Yet, I couldn't wait to see it again. 

Watching it was such a rich, exhilarating, disturbing, and equilibrium-losing roller coaster experience.

As much as it can be said of a director with only two films under his $800 belt (the actual cost of a Tom Ford belt, folks), Nocturnal Animals features these director "signatures" first on display in A Single Man (2009): 

Top - Colin Firth's character in A Single Man drives a vintage brown Mercedes-Benz. In Nocturnal Animals, a brown Mercedes is briefly glimpsed delivering the pivotal book manuscript (this is the only time the "real" Edward appears in the film). The same car is shown being driven by the fictional characters in Edward's novel.  

Center - Large-framed spectacles of the sort worn by Firth's character in A Single Man are worn by two characters in Nocturnal Animals. 

Bottom: A Single Man featured a protracted, comical scene with a character seated on a toilet. In Nocturnal Animals, Ray's unorthodox facilities are more unsettling than amusing.

Forget palm trees and beaches...THIS is Los Angeles

As a longtime L.A. resident, Nocturnal Animals offered me a provocative and figurative perspective on otherwise familiar surroundings. Having worked many years as a personal exercise trainer to wealthy clients, much of the privileged world and its inhabitants depicted in Nocturnal Animals is recognizable (albeit, from the outside looking in).

And "in" is the operative word here, for theirs is a world dominated by interiors. Moving from security-gated homes to their apartment-sized SUVs, they're driven to their laminated offices, work out in exclusive and sterile gyms before winding up the day at ostentatiously cloistered restaurants. The only time anyone spends outdoors is the length of time it takes to walk from one interior to the next. 

Nocturnal Animal's depiction of Los Angeles as a gray and blue landscape is quite apt; for who sees the sun when you're always wearing dark glasses and looking out at the world through the tinted windows of a limousine?

Zawe Ashton as Alex

The world Susan inhabits is a holed-up environment that offers many benefits (the illusion of safety, insulation from self-examination), but it also brings a unique set of problems. Problems that many wealthy individuals are conflicted about, due to the curious phenomenon that "having everything" very seldom, if ever, actually feels like it. Nobody has everything. That's a fact. But to have so much and still not feel fulfilled seems to eat the rich alive.

Jena Malone as Sage

The extreme (one might say, ridiculous), high-style fashion designs by Arianne Phillips play a significant role in establishing a sense of otherworldliness in Susan's surroundings and personal associations.

Andrea Riseborough and Michael Sheen
as socialite couple-of-convenience Alessia and Carlos

THE SUBJECTIVE GAZE
I have a weakness for films that play with the idea of perception. The subjective gaze and the possibly unreliable narrator fascinate me because when a film leaves it up to the viewer to draw their own conclusions based on the images presented, truly eye-opening things are revealed. Mostly about the viewer.
All three narratives in Nocturnal Animals (the present, the past, and the fictional) are viewed through Susan's perspective. Hers is the only reality we encounter. Whether it involves her reevaluation of the past, her sense of alienation in her current unhappy marriage and unfulfilling job, or her reaction to Edward's novel, our understanding of their reality relies solely on what we learn about Susan.

The subjectivity angle introduces many interesting points. For example, just because Susan feels guilty about her past doesn't mean she has sufficient cause. As a friend tells her, "You're awfully hard on yourself,"  and she is. In many ways, ALL the characters in Edward's novel convey some aspect of Susan's critically low self-regard. Nocturnal Animals is at its most intriguing when, on repeat viewings, one realizes how many people, objects, and circumstances from her life Susan has projected onto the events in Edward's novel. 

The Rich Fear the Poor/ The Poor Resent The Rich
The film's broad depiction of the redneck murderers (Karl Glusman as Lou) can be seen as Susan's amplification of a perceived the lack of safety in the world outside of the insulated, stainless steel gates of her interior decorated bunker 

Indeed, my own subjective gaze significantly influences why Nocturnal Animals affected me so strongly. Just a month before seeing it, a writer friend offered me the chance to read the pre-publication manuscript of her upcoming novel, telling me, “I think you’ll like it. You know these people.”

My friend is, independent of our knowing one another, one of my favorite authors, anyway; her books and short story collections never fail to engage me in their exploration of the complexity of human relationships. A compelling novelist of many books on varied topics, she most recently published a series of books for the Young Adult market. It was the expectation of revisiting the lighthearted tone of those novels that stayed foremost in my mind as I settled down with her manuscript.

I read the entire novel in two days, and nothing I knew about the woman or her previous work prepared me for this book. It was unexpectedly violent, emotionally heart-wrenching, and very sad; by the time I finished the last chapter, I was quite shaken and reduced to a crumpled heap of red eyes and a runny nose. The book left me both physically and emotionally drained. I was so startled that this brutally tense, suspenseful work came from the rather sweet, gentle-natured soul I knew. 

Jump ahead to late December, and I go to see Nocturnal Animals. Suffice it to say it was something of a wormholing experience. Here I am, a lifetime insomniac, shaken to the core by a book he's just read, watching a movie about another insomniac left shaken by the unexpected violence of an unpublished manuscript. A manuscript peopled with characters recognizable from her/my life.
To make an already unsettling experience even weirder, my author friend is a redhead who could be a ringer for Amy Adams and Isla Fisher. WTF?

As the film unfolded, I sat there with my jaw in my lap. Here I was watching a movie about the subjective experience of “reading” (literal, as in reading a book; figurative, as in the way self-reflection is a form of “reading” one’s own past), while undergoing a vivid, firsthand emotional reenactment of the same. 

“Sometimes, maybe it's not such a good idea to change things quite so much.”

THEMES
The intensity of Susan's remorse over the past--disaffection with the present, and existential disquietude arising from the metaphorical implications of her ex-husband's novel--forms Nocturnal Animals' threefold narrative structure. The ways in which these stories interrelate—mirror, comment upon, and reference one another- make Nocturnal Animals an aesthetically satisfying, sometimes harrowing, journey into the psyche of a woman on a path of self-confrontation. 

Green vs Red / Natural Instincts vs Violent Urges

The vivid red of violence is represented by the bright crimson light that floods the scene in which Susan breaks up with Edward (top), the curtain in the shanty room where Tony has his final confrontation with Ray (center), and by the scarlet lipstick worn by Susan (but eventually and tellingly removed) when she heads off for her fateful rendezvous with Edward.

Signifying perhaps a violent nature and the human impulse, Nocturnal Animals has Ray Marcus' green cowboy boots, his vintage Pontiac GTO, and Susan's "absolution dress" all sharing the same vivid green color.

As a symbol of nature, the color green and those associated with it come to signify the "nocturnal animals" populating the landscape of Susan's reality.

Art director Shane Valentino has said in interviews that the look of Nocturnal Animals was inspired in part by Antonioni's 1964 film Red Desert. In that film, a visual poem on alienation and the modern world, the colors green and red reach out to us from a bleak landscape of industrial gray. 

Red hair on a red sofa features prominently in two scenes of devastation: one emotional, where Susan betrays her lack of faith in Edward, and another physical, depicting two senseless murders.

Blinded

The glare from the stainless steel gate of Susan's fortress-like home momentarily blinds her in an image mirrored in Edward's novel when the character of Tony is blinded by an assailant. A bone of contention in Susan and Edward's marriage was Susan's blind spot when it came to her suppressed creativity and the way she failed to see the values she and her mother had in common. 

Spiritual Desolation

Nocturnal Animals is a tale of guilt, retribution, hoped-for redemption, and, most foreseeably, damnation. As characters abandon their humanity and as illusions of safety spiral into chaos, images of churches and crosses appear at increasingly regular intervals throughout the film. Top: A church stands alone in a barren landscape. Center: Edward/Tony wears a cross around his neck similar to that which is worn by his daughter in the novel, and by Susan. It's also the item he is clutching at the end of the novel. Bottom: Shaken by Edward's novel, Susan is frequently shown clutching the cross she wears around her neck as she reads. Raised a Catholic, Susan is guilt-ridden over having had an abortion without telling Edward, the violent death of a child in his novel, feeling like a veiled indictment.

Caged Animals

Recurring motifs of barred, glass interiors emphasize not only the isolation of the characters, but also reinforce the fear of being known or exposed (Susan remarks that her husband finds their declining fortunes "embarrassing." Likewise, she expresses feeling embarrassed after confiding in a friend). The remote interiors, with their bold framing lines and large glass panes, simultaneously resemble prisons, art installations, or cages in a human zoo. (Top: Susan's cold and foreboding home. Center: Texas interrogation room. Bottom: Yamashiro restaurant, Los Angeles.)

“Why did you give up on becoming an artist?”

STYLE

As if we hadn’t already traveled this path and learned our lesson from Stanley Kubrick, Michael Powell, and Alfred Hitchcock, many critics seem stalled on the dramatic visual style of Nocturnal Animals. The look chosen for this sparsely populated, introspective thriller is visually striking, often breathtakingly so, but some can’t seem to get past the curated gloss to access the story and characters within. The directors listed above were often criticized for the stylization of their films, but now that they’ve passed away (which is how it goes, I guess), everyone hails the artistic eloquence of their fluency in the visual language of cinema. 

The Los Angeles of Nocturnal Animals is no sunny vision of Paradise.
It's a cold, barely inhabited, slate-blue environment of gray skies and incessant rain 

No one is depicted outdoors in Ford's vision of Los Angeles. Like a formaldehyde-encased art installation, Susan occupies sterile interiors 

The narrative structure of Nocturnal Animals called upon Tom Ford and cinematographer Seamus McGarvey (in collaboration with the invaluable contributions of production designer Shane Valentino, art director Christopher Brown, and set decorator Meg Everist) to create the three distinct worlds representing Susan's reality. 

In a story told almost entirely from the internal and external perspective of its main character, one of the more arresting aspects of Nocturnal Animals is not merely that these worlds have to be depicted in different ways, but that they have to be depicted in ways subtly conveying that they are the not-entirely-realistic impressions of a single individual.  

As imagined by Susan, the West Texas desert is a vast, arid, sunbaked wasteland,
nightmarishly beautiful and  ominously desolate

With Susan so often shown in states of isolation within empty, cavernous environments, silently grappling with self-reflection, self-evaluation, and, most painfully, self-recrimination; the visual style takes over the storytelling. And while the images convey details, both significant and small, about Susan and her life, their evocation and content is consistently influenced by the loss of emotional equilibrium she experiences as the film progresses. The impact her ex-husband's novel has on Susan creates a mounting sense of unease in the character, reflected in the film's darker palette, heightened sense of menace, and discomfiting cold images.

Susan's flashbacks are naturalistic and warm in tone. They include the film's rare moments of affectionate human contact. In these sequences, dramatic moments are often punctuated with extreme bursts of color: a red velvet sofa, the bright scarlet of a street light, the stark whiteness of a dress

As these three concurrently running narratives bleed in and out of one another, the strong visual style of the segments guide us (per Susan's perceptions) as the individuals and actions in each story come to mirror and comment upon one another; both literally (clean-shaven Edward, red-headed mother and daughter) and allegorically (Hutton Morrow/Ray Marcus as handsome instruments of emotional violence and destruction).

There will always be those who feel that stylization and technical gloss in a film is emotionally distancing, and that visual grit is somehow closer to truth. I'm not in that camp, however, so I can appreciate that the Architectural Digest sheen of some parts of Nocturnal Animals carry as much dramatic weight as those cinema vérité, too-close-for-comfort close-ups in the fictional Texas narrative.

ART

Susan Morrow owns a successful art gallery and serves on the board of a major museum. As an art dealer, curator, and collector, Susan is haunted by her ex-husband's admonition that she studies art because she lacks the courage to be an artist herself. Though art plays a significant role in her life, over the years, that seed of doubt planted by her husband's words, along with her own uncertainty about the path she has chosen, has taken root as a cynical (healthy?) disdain for what passes for art in her world. Certainly, her gallery's multimedia installation combining images of nude obese women and kitsch Americana seems to suggest that her disillusionment with her profession is well-founded.

Carlos

"I thought the work was incredibly strong. So perfect with this junk culture we live in."

Susan

"It is junk. Total junk."

Nocturnal Animals, a work of art itself, makes inspired use of artwork throughout, informing character and providing silent commentary on the film's themes.

Exquisite Pain
Artist Damien Hirst depicts the death of Saint Sebastian as a steer pierced by arrows. My partner reminded me that Saint Sebastian is the patron saint of those who desire a holy death. Something Susan, as a Catholic, might fear is lost to her

Jeff Koons' Balloon Dog sculpture graces the backyard of Susan and Hutton's grotesquely ginormous home. As indicated by the crane, the sculpture, along with several crated art items in the house, is slated to be sold by the financially beleaguered couple.

A jarring photograph by Richard Misrach (Desert Fire #153), appearing to depict a ritual killing in the desert, is located in the entryway of Susan's home. Perhaps the source of the vision of Texas Susan imagines while reading Edward's manuscript?

Mooning
The blood-red wall of Susan's austere and decorously spartan office is adorned
 by John Currin's "Nude in a Convex Mirror."

“Nobody gets away with what you did. Nobody.”

THE ENDING

I feel it’s important to stress that this essay is my personal, subjective analysis of Nocturnal Animals, representative of how the film spoke to me. I intend neither an unequivocal “explanation” of the film and its themes, nor a wholesale endorsement encouraging the reader to run out and buy tickets, guaranteed of having the same experience. The mere fact that I have absolutely no complaints with the film stands as evidence of my lack of objectivity. I loved everything about this movie. From the brilliance of the performances to Ford's deft direction and stylistic touches, Nocturnal Animals is just my kind of cinema.

Because my experience was so rewarding,  I've enjoyed reading about how problematic so many people found the film's conclusion to be. It's an astonishingly powerful ending as far as I'm concerned, and the fact that I didn't anticipate it in the least—in spite of its thematic consistency—is what I loved about it. It's one of those endings that thirty people can watch and no two of them will be in exact accord as to what it all means. Some find it frustratingly vague; me, it takes me back to the heyday of '70s cinema when filmmakers were fine with making movies open to multiple interpretations, then leaving viewers to draw their own conclusions. 

I won't be offering an explanation to the ending here. But I will suggest that it is neither as devastating nor as positive as one might initially presume. Merely consider what I mentioned earlier, that, at least as far as what I've discovered to be true in my own life, growth and happiness are sometimes only possible through the lessons one learns through pain and loss. In which case, what may appear at first glance to be hopeless and devastating about the conclusion of Nocturnal Animals might, in reality, be the key to ultimately freeing a particular nocturnal animal from her many cages.  

“You just can't walk from things all the time." 

Amy Adams and Zawe Ashton in a clip from "Nocturnal Animals" (2016)

Copyright © Ken Anderson     2009 - 2017

DEATH BECOMES HER 1992

In today's digitized, high-definition world—in which real-life, flesh-and-blood humans from the most mundane walks of life willingly subject themselves to near-medieval levels of torture in an effort to achieve the burnished, robo-mannequin sheen of Photoshopped magazine covers—I don't think it's possible to lampoon our culture's extreme youth addiction and obsession with physical perfection. 

Happily, in 1992 (ten years before Botox, and back when Cher and Michael Jackson were the reigning poster kids for plastic surgery excess), director Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future, Forest Gump) made this demented and dark comedy that broadly burlesques contemporary society's two most dominant religions: the worship of beauty and the fear of aging.

"Wrinkled, wrinkled little star. Hope they never see the scars."
In the original screenplay, the line was "Wrinkle, wrinkle, go away, come again on Doris Day."
Elizabeth Taylor spoke a similar line of dialogue to her reflection in The Mirror Crack'd (1980).

In this self-professed nod to Tales from the Crypt (the comic-book-based HBO anthology series for which Zemeckis co-produced and occasionally directed), Death Becomes Her is a comedy-of-the-grotesque cartoon that posits the dream of eternal youth as an upscale zombie nightmare. Set in a baroque, just-barely exaggerated vision of Beverly Hills where the thunderclaps and lightning flashes all hit their marks and know their cues, Death Becomes Her spans 51 years (1978 to 2029) in chronicling the ongoing competition between two college frenemies. A bitter rivalry every bit as combative and twice as deadly as Batman vs. Superman…only with better dialogue.

Meryl Streep as Madeline Ashton

Bruce Willis as Dr. Ernest Menville

Goldie Hawn as Helen Sharp

Isabella Rossellini as Lisle Von Rhuman

Former Radcliffe classmates Madeline Ashton (Mad for short) and Helen Sharp (Hel for keeps) are the kind of friends that only a shared alma mater could produce. Though we ultimately come to learn that they are but two antagonistic sides of the same counterfeit coin, when first glimpsed, the artificial Madeline and the apprehensive Helen couldn't be more dissimilar, appearing to be friends in name only. 

Plain-Jane Helen, an aspiring author of diffident, soft-spoken character and unconcerned with appearance, has a history of having her boyfriends stolen by the ostentatiously glamorous Madeline. Madeline, an obscenely shallow, superhumanly self-enchanted actress of questionable talent, is all surface charm and charisma, but otherwise appears totally devoid of a single redeeming character trait. She's preoccupied with appearance to the exclusion of all else. 

"Tell me, doctor...do you think I'm starting to NEED you?"

The women's heated rivalry temporarily assumes the guise of a romantic triangle when beginning-to-show-her-age Madeline sets her sights upon (and effortlessly steals) Helen's fiancé, the bland-but-gifted Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Ernest Menville. Of course, there's no romance to this romantic triangle at all, what with Madeline's interest in the colorless dolt being solely of the self-serving variety (she gets to assert her desirability superiority over Helen while simultaneously securing a lifetime of free nip/tuck services); but this last-straw betrayal by both fiancé and friend proves to be enough to send poor milquetoast Helen right over the edge. 

What's The Matter With Helen?

Cue the passage of fourteen years. Everybody is miserable, and nobody winds up with what they thought they wanted. Madeline, career and looks in decline, is blatantly unfaithful to husband Ernest, and goes to Norma Desmond extremes to stay young. Meanwhile, emasculated Ernest has succumbed to alcoholism and is reduced to plying his surgical skills on corpses. 

But it's Helen who rises like an Avenging Angel from the doughnut-crumbed, canned-frosting ruins of her nervous breakdown. Magnificently svelte, newly glamorized, channeling her inner Madeline, and, thanks to several years of therapy, imbued with a Dolly Levi-esque sense of purpose ("For I've got a goal again! I've got a drive again! I'm gonna feel my heart coming alive again!"). Naturally, Helen's goals aren't nearly as lofty or honorable as those of that musical matchmaker: Helen's newfound purpose is to reclaim her life through the eradication of Madeline's.

Hel Goes Mad and Dedicates Her Life To Making Mad's Life Hell

Alas, Helen's strength of resolve is all well and good, but homicidally speaking, the best-laid plans of mice and men are doomed to failure when the man in question (Ernest) is an indisputable mouse. By the same token, it's not the best idea to wage a to-the-death battle when both combatants, thanks to the supernatural intervention of a raven-haired sorceress and her immortality potion, can't really die.

I saw Death Becomes Her for the first time on cable TV in the mid-'90s, and I immediately regretted never having seen it in a theater. I thought it was outrageously funny, and I imagined seeing it with an audience would have been an experience similar to my first time seeing What's Up, Doc?: the laughter being so loud and continuous, you have to see the film twice to pick up all the lost dialogue. I've no idea if public response to Death Becomes Her was anywhere near as vociferous (it's a weird little film), but I found it to be one of the most consistently funny comedies I'd seen since the '70s heyday of Mel Brooks, Gene Wilder, & Madeline Kahn.

Death Becomes Her opened in L.A. on Friday, July 31, 1992

Applying comic book sensibilities and B-horror movie tropes to a dark satire of those frozen-in-time animatronic waxworks endemic to the environs of Beverly Hills, Death Becomes Her provides director Robert Zemeckis with an ideal vehicle to indulge his fondness for absurdist special effects. The screenplay, a best-of-both-worlds/Frankenstein collaboration between TV sitcom writer Martin Donovan (That Girl, The MTM Show) and action/adventure writer Martin Koepp- (Jurassic Park, Mission impossible), deftly maintains a balance of broad action (think Tex Avery cartoons or Bugs vs. Daffy Looney Tunes) and oversized characterizations.  

Director Sydney Pollack (They Shoot Horses, Don't They?)
contributes a hilarious unbilled cameo 

Which brings me to Death Becomes Her's most vital attribute: its cast. Streep, Hawn, and Willis—talented professionals all—had, at this stage in their careers, fallen into that movie star rut of delivering precisely what was expected of them, nothing more. A look back at their film output during this time reveals each actor delivering a steady stream of reliable-but-unexceptional performances in so-so films. Professional, journeyman-like performances devoid of either spark or surprise.

But Death Becomes Her—in casting against type—taps into something fresh in each of them. With abandon, they lose themselves to the outlandish, outsized characters they're called upon to play, blowing away the cobwebs of stagnation from their individual screen personas. Together they form an unholy trinity of bad behavior while treating us to the liveliest, most unexpected, enjoyably over-the-top emoting of their careers.

Madder 'n Hell
(Mad, Ern, & Hel)

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

When television broadcasts changed from analog to digital and I purchased my first HDTV, one of my strongest initial impressions was how dazzlingly crisp and clear the images were. Simultaneously, I noted how clinically unforgiving all that clarity was to the imperfections of mere mortals. 

Television programs I had grown used to watching in their natural, semi-fuzzy state were suddenly crystal clear. The images so sharp in detail that I could make out the weave of the knit fibers in Fred Mertz's jacket.

But, my lord, the havoc it played with people's faces! It was like you were looking at everyone through a dermatologist's magnifying glass—bringing to mind that line from Cukor's The Women: "Good grief! I hate to tell you, dear, but your skin makes the Rocky Mountains look like chiffon velvet!" 

Longtime favorites Goldie Hawn and Meryl Streep
really come alive playing zombies

I don't know what it was like elsewhere, but the cumulative effect HDTV had on local Los Angeles newscasters and even minor TV personalities was to have men and women scrambling, en masse, to plastic surgeons. It must have looked like the final reel of The Day of the Locust. 

Over the last decade or so, the already youth-and-looks-obsessed entertainment industry has seen a normalization of the kind of rampant surgical restructuring that once caused Mickey Rourke and Cher so much tabloid grief. The "artificially enhanced" appearance has now grown so common, it has become its own aesthetic.

What Price Beauty?

And while everybody seems fine with health-related elective surgeries like dental and Lasik, people still harbor strong opposing opinions about those who turn to medical science in order to turn back the clock, retard the aging process, or sculpt and reconfigure themselves to fit a particular beauty standard.

Death Becomes Her is no serious treatise on our culture's preoccupation with youth and slavish devotion to rigid beauty standards, but by addressing these hot-button issues in a comical, larger-than-life framework, it manages to be one of the sharpest and to-the-point commentaries on the subject committed to film.

PERFORMANCES

Broad, farcical comedy of the sort employed in Death Becomes Her is extremely difficult to pull off (1991's Soapdish comes to mind…unfavorably). In fact, the main reason I didn't see Death Becomes Her when it was released was because the trailer so turned me off. Not only did it look far too exaggerated and silly (it recalled Streep's She-Devil, a film I absolutely hated). But, in addition: I was never a fan of Bruce Willis; Goldie Hawn's post-Private Benjamin output had grown increasingly derivative, and the continued forays into comedy by Streep-the-Serious (Postcards from the Edge, Defending Your Life) I'd largely felt had had the effect of subduing her talent, not showcasing it. 

It surprises me a bit to glance over Bruce Willis' long list of credits on IMDB and come to the conclusion that Mortal Thoughts (1991) and Death Becomes Her are the only films of his I like. He's so good here. Funny and touching, he provides a grounded emotional contrast to his co-stars' magnificent maliciousness

But what always brings me back to rewatching Death Becomes Her is how all the elements gel so smoothly. Everyone from composer Alan Silvestri to the film's vast army of FX wizards is on the same darkly comic page. Best of all, the actors and their pitch-perfect performances are never dwarfed by the now-dated but still-impressive special effects.

The comedy is perhaps too dark to be to everyone's taste; likewise, the tone of amplified non-reality. But for me, all these disparate elements coalesce to create a howlingly funny film that feels like a major studio version of one of those reveling-in-bad-taste underground/counterculture comedies like Andy Warhol's BAD or John Waters' Female Trouble (which could serve as Death Becomes Her's subtitle).

The arresting Isabella Rossellini is a special effect all unto herself.
I've no idea if it was intentional, but casting the woman who was--for 14 years--the international face of anti-aging cosmetics (Lancome) is genius. 

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

A major highlight of Death Becomes Her is getting to see the great Madeline Ashton in full diva-fabulous mode, appearing onstage in a misguided musical version of Tennessee Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth. A play, appropriately enough, about an aging star making a comeback. The time is 1978, and, as described in the screenplay, our first glimpse of 40-ish Madeline is of her: "Singin' and dancin' up a storm seemingly without benefit of training in singin' or dancin'."

The song she's singing is a riotously vainglorious paean to self, titled "Me," and the accompanying dance production number is a garish compendium of every star-gets-hoisted-about-by-chorus-boys Broadway musical cliché in the book. The number is terrible—from the song itself to the costuming, choreography (they break into "The Hustle" at one uproarious point), and the over-emphasized "stereotypically gay" voices of the chorus boys—and therefore, it's also absolutely brilliant.

What's great about the number is that, without benefit of inserting any intentionally comedic elements (save for a ceaselessly shedding feather boa), it manages to be side-splittingly funny and cheesy as all get-out merely by channeling any number of '70s variety shows. As a quick glance at YouTube will attest, this isn't a spoof or parody at all. Nothing about Madeline's dance routine would be out of place on an episode of The Hollywood Palace, The Ed Sullivan Show, or take-your-pick Mitzi Gaynor TV special.

Although Madeline is supposed to be awful, Streep is actually quite marvelous. Her musicality and phrasing are spot on. Her movements are sharp, she never misses a beat with any of her gestures, and there's an effortlessness to the number of small bits of comic business she's able to insert into the performance without ever losing her stride. What really makes the number so hysterically funny is the level of Las Vegas showroom self-satisfaction Madeline radiates throughout. In her mind, she is clearly laying them in the aisles. The joy she takes in her own wonderfulness and sincere obliviousness to just how ridiculous the number is makes for a priceless moment in wince-inducing musical cinema.

The first time I saw Streep perform "Me," what immediately popped into mind was the 1986 Academy Awards telecast. That was the year Teri Garr opened the show with a truly cringe-worthy production number built around the song Flying Down To Rio, that was every bit as atrocious as Madeline's First Act closer (even down to the same tearaway skirt and hyperactive chorus boys). Further cementing the recollection: Meryl Streep, who was nominated that year for Out of Africa, when interviewed about the show afterward, expressed her enjoyment of Garr's performance and her wish to someday do a musical and get to sing and dance in a production number like it. She got her wish.

The late actress Alaina Reed (Sesame Street, 227) as the psychologist
who inadvertently sets Helen opon her murderous course 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Like Sweet Charity, Fatal Attraction, and the musical version of Little Shop of Horrors, Death Becomes Her is a film whose original ending was jettisoned due to unfavorable preview response.

Grotesquely disfigured and unable to maintain themselves with any level of precision,
Madeline & Helen attend Ernest's funeral in the year 2029

In the original version, after escaping from Lisle's, Ernest fakes his death. He runs off with Toni (Tracey Ullman, the entirety of whose footage ended up on the cutting room floor), a sympathetic owner of a local bar he frequented. Jump ahead 27 years, Madeline and Helen, still beautiful and perfect, are in the Swiss Alps, bored with life and each other's company. In the distance, they glimpse an old, hunched-over, toddling married couple. Madeline comments on how pathetic they are; Helen, as she watches them walk away, hand in liver-spotted hand, is not so sure. We learn that the couple is Ernest and Toni, now very old, but very much in love. Fade Out.

I absolutely adore that ending! Test audiences claimed the more poignant conclusion didn't fit the more cartoonish flavor of the rest of the film, so rewrites and reshoots resulted in the very good, very funny ending currently in place. It's not a bad ending at all, and based on the success of the film, it is perhaps more in keeping with the tone established at the start, but honestly, I just love the idea of the jettisoned ending. I think it would have provided the perfect coda for a wonderful film.

Helen and Madeline, talons sharpened, have become living gargoyles

Clip from "Death Becomes Her"  - 1992

BONUS MATERIAL
Goldie Hawn discusses her preference for the film's original ending HERE

Meryl Streep discusses her preference for the new ending HERE

The original theatrical trailer features many scenes that never made it into the final film. HERE

 

Copyright © Ken Anderson    2009 - 2016