When the omicron variant surged, I knew I wasn’t going to be all that comfortable going to the movies, so I stopped and waited for the surge to pass. That came around the same time the awards season movies start to pop up in theaters, and one I was really sorry to have to miss was Nightmare Alley. I saw Guillermo del Toro’s name on it, and 2017’s The Shape of Water was my favorite movie of that year. I had somewhat assumed del Toro with Nightmare Alley had just done for the old 30s exploitation/horror movie Freaks what he did for The Creature from the Black Lagoon with The Shape of Water. As it is, I only (very) recently learned Nightmare Alley is a remake of a 1947 noir starring Tyrone Power where Power was attempting to break his swashbuckler image, apparently unsuccessfully despite the movie’s being considered rather good in its own right.
The original is actually available on YouTube while the remake is, probably due to weird contract issues, up on both HBO Max and Hulu at the same time.
Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper) appears in the opening minutes as a man without much of anything aside from a radio. He finds himself at a carnival, and after trying to skip out of a geek show without paying, is hired on to work by owner Clem Hoatley (Willem Dafoe). He starts off as something of a laborer, but he gradually learns the art of mentalism from husband-and-wife team Pete and Zeena Krumbien (David Strathaim and Toni Collette). It’s not for real, and they don’t pretend for a moment it is, and it turns out Carlisle is something of a natural at both that and showmanship in general. He likewise finds himself attracted to fellow performer Molly (Rooney Mara). The two leave the carnival to get married and have greater fortunes elsewhere.
Two years later, that is very much the case as Stanton performs for high society types in the big city. He goes a little too far one night after being challenged by psychiatrist Lilith Ritter (Cate Blanchett). She has more or less figured out his act, and she has a plan that involves perhaps using Stanton’s skills to con the wealthy and the bereaved. Stanton at the start of the movie seemed more concerned for others, even trying to get through to Clem’s heavily-abused geek, and his romance of Molly was genuine, but success seems to have changed him. How far will he go, and what does Lilith even want from him?
I was really looking forward to this as I said above. Del Toro’s work often has a grotesque beauty to it with an aesthetic all of its own. The fact he never directed the Hobbit movies may be one of the biggest “what ifs” in cinema, and I would describe his work as a cross between Tim Burton and Steven Spielberg, combing Burton’s unique look with Spielberg’s sense of wonder with a smattering of del Toro’s own sympathy for the outcast, only he’s far better than Burton without quite getting to the level of Spielberg–though to be fair, few directors get to Spielberg’s level if any. Nightmare Alley is very much a del Toro project. Actors like Colette, Blanchet, Dafoe, and del Toro veteran Ron Perlman all have the sorts of faces that would fit very well into one of del Toro’s movies while Cooper is a reliable lead actor. The fact that del Toro is making a grotesque noir should be something I would very much enjoy. At the least, I knew Nightmare Alley was going to look pretty.
And yet, it doesn’t quite seem to come together. It might have done better to show more of Stanton’s decline from generally earnest man romancing Molly and learning the ropes to the profession to the sort of man who will ignore the good advice of Pete and Zeena and take an act too far. There is a mysterious scene played out in silence in the movie’s opening, explained at the end, that says a lot about the character, but for the most part, he seems mostly like Stanton is a man trying to get by with a dirty secret. It could be del Toro is using the first half or so to just show Stanton is maybe just interested in the showmanship, having a knack for it, and he isn’t completely innocent of what he’s doing, but he goes from a man willing to learn things to a man who doesn’t want to listen to people who actually understand what he’s doing has consequences. Now, even the worst of del Toro’s filmography is still at least fun, and Nightmare Alley certainly is that, but the end result is a movie that I had hoped to rank somewhere alongside his best work like The Shape of Water or Pan’s Labyrinth, but instead, it’s more like a mostly pleasant diversion that didn’t stick with me as much as I would have wanted.
Grade: C+
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