Bonfire of the Yuppies

 

Sean Durkin’s The Nest, opening in selected theatres today and on video on demand November 17, follows Rory (Jude Law) and Allison (Carrie Coon) as they move from a comfortable suburban American life to an ambitious one in Britain. The film has elements of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (Anthony Minghella 1999) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941), and there are even aspects of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (Brian De Palma 1990). But really this is a psychological drama. The story is set in 1986. Rory O’Hara is an ambitious but fickle stock trader and gets an opportunity to move home to Britain to work for his old boss Arthur Davis (Michael Culkin). Allison, a horse trainer, is perfectly happy in the US. When Rory tells her he wants to move to London she replies, “Go fuck yourself.” Move they do, and into an opulent, centuries old, if a bit creepy, Sussex mansion. Rory commutes to an office tower in London’s financial district. All goes well until it doesn’t. Rory can’t support this opulent lifestyle and Allison has to pay contractors from her secret stash after the checks bounce. It all goes downhill from there. Rory plots a merger with Davis’s company but the details don’t work out. His win-around-the-next-corner aspirations keep turning sour. He ends up trying to coopt a colleague, Steve’s (Adeel Akhtar) Norwegian fish farms acquisition but is embarrassed by an increasingly disgruntled Allison at a formal clients’ dinner. The physical displacement from America to Britain mirrors the financial dislocation as the couple spirals into debt and increasingly becomes estranged from one another. While the ever-ambitious Rory keeps coming up short in the financial world Allison starts to psychologically unravel and at one point tries to dig up her beloved horse, Richmond’s, grave. Law is perfect as the social climbing almost amoral stock trader consumed with material success in the go-go 1980s fueled by massive government deregulation. And Coon is amazing as his strong skeptical wife who is as distraught by the family’s (they have two kids) predicaments as she is enraged at her husband. Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry’s fraught score underlines the gathering tension. The Nest is an adult film that examines the exterior and interior worlds that can strain married couples, regardless of what social class they may be in.