Nightmare Alley (2021) - Aesthetically stunning thriller’s fortunes run out
Credit: allocine.fr
Bradley Cooper stars in Guillermo del Toro’s latest Oscar-nominated picture, a rags-to-riches-to-rags-again thriller about ambitious Stanton Carlisle, who joins a carnival and develops a knack for deceiving his audience. An adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham’s 1947 novel, del Toro’s visuals, costume design and story-world are as breath-taking as his previous Academy Award winners’ – and yet Nightmare Alley fails to capture as much, displaying none of the dreamy and fantastic qualities of Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) nor the vulnerability and humanity of The Shape of Water (2017).
In 1939, Carlisle buries a body in the floorboards and sets his house on fire without looking back. A quiet, hatted figure with an air of mystery, things nevertheless come relatively quickly to him – a one-dollar job turns into a meal; a meal turns into a bath; a bath turns into training under the carnival’s clairvoyants, couple Pete (David Strathairn) and Zeena (Toni Collette). But Carlisle is hungry for more despite the welcome he receives: instead, he continues to develop his talents as a manipulator and proposes a double act outside of the carnival to the discreet and impressionable Molly (Rooney Mara), culminating in the performance of a lifetime that might cost him just that.
Del Toro’s cinematography is as usual faultless, a result of hours upon hours of scouring paintings and photographs for the perfect shot: when Carlisle enter the carnival for the first time, it is like we are discovering it with him, forced into his shoes; the scene in which Molly calls home is like an Edward Hopper painting. Attention to colour, texture, lighting is highlighted by del Toro’s actors, who fit into his frame effortlessly: Cate Blanchett’s pale face and red mouth, Rooney Mara’s doe eyes, Willem Dafoe’s angular features. It is atmospheric and beautiful, quietly addressing the politics of the 1940s without making them the centre of the attention. Outside of Carlisle and the bordering on psychotic Dr Lilith Ritter, played by suave and seductive Blanchett, there are some hauntingly touching performances, from the alcoholic but well-meaning Pete, to the grieving Mrs Kimball (Mary Steenburgen), to even the desperate – if dangerous – Ezra Grindle (Richard Jenkins), who employs Carlisle to bring back his lover, Dorrie, who died of a forced abortion. “People are desperate to tell you who they are, to be seen”, Pete tells Carlisle during his training, something the latter adopts as his life motto.
Credit: allocine.fr
However, Del Toro’s latest ultimately suffers from a lack of electricity: where the visuals and camerawork are stunning, the story is long-winded, dragging, aside from the final twenty minutes which one eighty the film, almost Tarantino-style. Characters are well-developed enough, but there is neither the extreme vice of the love-hate relationship with an anti-hero, nor the humanity that piques support for a traditional protagonist. There is, simply, an alarming amount of indifference, to the outcome of characters arcs, to the deaths of side carnies, the sufferings of discarded lovers. Perhaps those who incite any emotion are the audience, those who are blinded by their unhappiness and thus too trusting to recognise larger-than-life characters. This is the first of del Toro’s films not to feature a fantastical creature of some sort, but his point throughout is as clear as day: there is no need.
As he stated in an interview, Nightmare Alley is about the “flimsy barrier between truth and lies”, the manipulation of those who are suffering and vulnerable, the mechanisms of taking advantage. If anything, it is the darkest of del Toro’s works, because it consistently highlights the inherent treachery of humanity, using Carlisle as the quintessence of deceit. And yet he is also the perfect epitome of what it is to go too far. In a role that renders him strangely unrecognisable, Cooper gives Carlisle an economical quality: he is smooth talking and seductive only when he needs to be, remaining quiet and calculating the rest of the time. His talent is not that he can read minds or the future, but that he can read people, raw, naïve people who seek solace in their grief, almost like a 1940s Sherlock Holmes. Whether there is anything innovative in this message however is an entirely different matter, pertaining to the now almost overworked idea that humans are inherently awful. Regardless, paired with del Toro’s signature atmospheric detail and cinematography, Nightmare Alley is somewhat different, a flawed but ultimately stylish ride.