Nightmare Alley
DISNEY
With a nationwide sneak preview tonight and a full-on theatrical debut beginning Thursday night at 6:00 pm, Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley is very much a filmmaker in mastery of the sandbox of his choosing, using fortune and glory to craft a deeply old-fashioned star-driven potboiler. The film is a remake of a Tyrone Power-starring film noir, faithful in broad narrative strokes but its own thing (or at least its own adaption of William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 novel) thanks to plenty of spit and polish. Whether or not it deserves or receives awards season love or Oscar nominations, it’s a fine example of the high-end, high-quality Hollywood product we’d get slightly more regularly if audiences actually showed up.
Set in the 1940’s, Nightmare Alley concerns an ambitious carny (Bradley Cooper) who ends up within a traveling circus. Stan works for the clairvoyant (Toni Collette) and her alcoholic husband (David Strathairn) and eventually takes a liking to young(er) Molly (Rooney Mara) whose gimmick is electrocuting herself. One complication leads to another over the film’s slow-burn and richly atmospheric first act, with Stan and Molly eloping together to put their skills in mimicking clairvoyance to better use among higher-class clientele. A chance encounter with a high-end psychologist (Cate Blanchett) during a glitzy performance results in a mutually-beneficial long con involving extraordinarily rich men (personified by Richard Jenkins) and the loved ones who have since passed on. What can go wrong?
Penned by Guillermo del Toro and Kim Morgan, Nightmare Alley is a visually spectacular and superbly-acted morality play, offering a stacked cast (including Willem Dafoe, Ron Perlman and Mary Steenburgen in small-but-essential roles) relishing the chance to partake in this kind of big-budget, non-franchise Hollywood “movie-movie.” In a world where audiences actually showed up for Fox’s many ambitious, inclusive, original, and/or adult-skewing studio programmers in 2018 instead of just Deadpool 2 and Bohemian Rhapsody, I’d say this is exactly the kind of film Disney wanted in their arsenal when word first dropped about them buying Fox. Beyond just buying them a seat at the Oscar table, I was slightly hopeful that Disney wanted at least some foothold in the “big movies for adults” niche.
Dan Lausten’s dark but vibrant cinematography, Tamara Deverell’s likely-to-be-nominated production design and Luis Sequeira’s lushly ravishing costumes compliment a slate of terrific performances. Cooper is as good as he’s ever been, offering a poker-faced portrayal of an enigmatic huckster who relishes his talents and isn’t quite he has a conscience. Blanchett almost steals the film as a conniving and unapologetic femme fatale. Mara is mostly the film’s metaphorical Jiminy Cricket, and Mara/Blanchett dynamic threatens to drift into virgin/whore territory. However, there is nuance to a character who finds herself as the only decent soul amid a slew of pragmatic monsters. Strathairn does much with a small role as a dying man fearful of his inevitable destination. Oh and, relatively speaking, everyone is ridiculously good-looking.
While the film’s destination won’t surprise students of the genre, there is suspense in its Hitchcockian “quicksand in plain view” sensibility. There are several terrific individual scenes, including (but not limited to) Stan’s first big city show, the one-on-ones between the con artist and the shrink and the film’s pitch-black epilogue which ends on the film on a striking and haunting final image. It’s a little long, at 140-minutes, but it also relishes its specific cinematic pleasures, existing as a top-of-the-line movie with no larger commercial goal beyond justifying the ticket price. As much as any theatrical film this year, Nightmare Alley is a lazy river of a movie, one which invites you to float down its ghoulish, engrossing and specifically-enchanting cinematic spell.
