Nightmare Alley
As reported by Dollyforme
Letting director Guillermo del Toro play around with a '40s-era carnival, with its strongmen, mentalists, electrified ladies, halls of mirrors, and displays of fetus grotesqueries in formaldehyde-filled jars, is like letting a pyromaniac loose in a Viking display showroom. Short of Wes Anderson, no director is as good at finding the best outlet for their particular predilections than the Mexican Oscar winner. His remake of "Nightmare Alley," the classic Edmund Goulding noir from 1947 hits so many of his considerable visual sweet-spots, you can practically feel his exhilaration in every scene.
It's justified. The film -- working off the brilliantly pitiless original screenplay by Jules Furthman (from the novel by William Lindsay Gresham) -- co-written by del Toro and Kim Morgan, keeps much of the hard-bitten ruthlessness of the original, while expanding on the visuals in a way that further invigorates the material.
As we meet Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper), he's in the process of dragging a body through an old, dilapidated house somewhere in the plains, and depositing it into a hole ripped into the floorboards, before lighting the whole place on fire. His motivations are unclear, as is his character, beyond the Fedora and perpetual smoke hanging just off his lips. He goes into town, gets onto a bus, headed nowhere in particular, and conks out.
He arrives, more or less randomly, at another stop somewhere in the plains, which happens to have a traveling carnival in town. There, he quickly ingratiates himself with the owner, Clem (Willem Dafoe), who, among other things, explains to him how it is he steadily procures a "geek," for the "man or animal" exhibit -- it involves slipping a tincture of opium into the shots of booze he offers nearby vagrants looking for work. He also makes friends with the carny mentalist, Zeena (Toni Collette), and her brilliant-but-drunken husband, Pete (David Strathairn). Eventually, Pete starts teaching Stanton the tricks behind a successful act he and Zeena used to perform to wild acclaim in Europe.
Inspired, Stanton makes a pitch to the beautiful Molly (Rooney Mara), who has an "electrified girl" bit, to run away with him and take their act on the road, where they can make real money. Soon enough, the pair have developed a wildly successful mentalist show, that keeps them in luxury hotels and plenty of gigs, but that's still not enough for Stanton, who, as ever, seems driven by unknown forces to make it big, and bigger, still.
When he meets the fetching Lilith (Cate Blanchett), a local psychiatrist for the well-to-do set in the city (possibly Buffalo, but never actually identified), he conjures up an even more lucrative opportunity, providing the very wealthy with "spiritual seances" (which he refers to as "spook shows") allowing them to "communicate" with their dearly departed. On tips from Lilith, who seems to know the inside story on just about everybody with money in town, he successfully spins out this side gig, until he meets Ezra Grindle (Richard Jenkins), a very wealthy man with a deeply guilt-stricken past, who pays Stanley a small fortune to put him in contact with the lost love of his life, whom he betrayed many years before as a young man.
Typical of the noir genre, there is, shall we say, a lot of story, with various plot mechanisms spinning and whirring away, sometimes on asides that don't seem terribly relevant at the time, but to the writers' considerable credit, each smaller piece somehow is put to proper use by the time the end credits roll.
Cooper, playing a man who dominates the film's screen time but largely remains an enigma to the audience, is in exceptional form here, using his natural charm and likability to create the perfect smoke-screen for what turns out to be a much more bitter and craven personality ("People are desperate to tell you who they are," he sniffs at one point). He is a stranger to us from the film's opening images, even as he takes to the shifty, always-on con of the carny life, like the proverbial fish to water (at one point, he tells Molly he has finally found the thing he's good at). Blanchett, too, takes to her role -- the classic femme fatale, one step ahead of the men who underestimate her -- with gusto that borders on voracious; as does Dafoe, who, one imagines in a past life, was born to be a carny.
Much is made of the multiple sorts of confidence games at work here: From the crude-but-effective twists the carnies pull over the local rubes, and the high-end style Stanton and Molly employ on the wealthy upper crusters, to Lilith's manner of psychoanalytic probing (she cajoles her patients to literally lie down on her office couch). It's all one spin-job or the other, a way for guileless people to be had, giving up their money and dignity along the way.
All of which is perfectly fascinating unto itself, but, true to form, del Toro also stuffs the screen with delightfully unnerving visual tropes -- Clem's pride and joy is a horrible carcass of a monster baby he's dubbed "Enoch," suspended in one of those aforementioned jars -- and a phantasmagoria of grubby carnival stalls, high-end hotels, hopeless hallways, and a moonlit garden that feels as if it's floating on ether itself. He also has fun with the film's dialogue, baroque and hard-boiled (a strongman's fist becomes "five good pounds of meat and bone"), further adding to the unnerving ambience. The acclaimed director's mise en scene is so potent and effective, it warps your insides, like one of the distorting fun house mirrors he so gleefully includes in such abundance.
