I know from reading the responses to the movie when it played at the Toronto Film Festival that some critics were very angry about the film’s opening images, which play over its opening credits. I’m not going to be coy here—they are shots of a series of naked women festooned with cheerleader regalia, shaking pom-poms and brandishing lit sparklers and such. The twist is, these naked women are, to a one, morbidly obese, sometimes to the point of looking deformed or mutilated, and the shots are, it should be no surprise to learn, in slow motion.
As I observed when I wrote about the movie in September, from the Venice Film Festival, said images aren’t gratuitous, or—I should have said—without a diegetic rationale. (This review draws on the thoughts and words I had about the film at that September viewing.) The cheerleaders are part of a conceptual art exhibit hosted by Amy Adams' Susan, a gallery-owning high roller in the Los Angeles art world. Susan is beautiful, haughty, lives an extravagant lifestyle funded largely, we assume, by her husband Hutton, played with born-into-privilege knowingness by Armie Hammer, and thoroughly, thoroughly miserable. After her opening, Susan gives herself a nasty paper cut opening a package: the manuscript of a first novel by Edward Sheffield, Susan’s first husband. She’s disturbed by the package and the accompanying note. So disturbed that she impulsively reveals herself, indirectly, to one of her many personal assistants, asking that assistant about whether one’s life choices could add up eventually to a single awful mistake. The assistant, who hasn’t yet made any crucial life choices, has no idea what Susan is talking about.
Susan soon settles in with Edward’s novel. At this point in the meticulously designed and directed film, a seemingly parallel narrative pops up. Tony Hastings, a refined, cultured family man, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, is taking off on a road trip through West Texas with lovely wife (Isla Fisher) and lovely but typically disaffected teen daughter (Ellie Bamber). On the road, late at night, Tony and his family have a run-in with exactly the kind of people with whom you don’t want to have a run-in, under any circumstances. From behind, from aside, and from ahead, three amped-up wastrels led by a schizzy dude named Ray (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, in a role that will earn him the legit cred he’s been going after, on and off, for a while), harass Tony and his car until they both run off the road. Things go from bad to worse in a sequence that’s one of the most discomfortingly suspenseful in a Hollywood film since, maybe, “Blue Velvet.” We know, or at least can infer, that it isn’t real, that it’s actually two degrees of unreal, since what’s happening is a cinematic version of the novel that Edward has sent. The novel that Edward has dedicated to Susan.
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