Nightmare Alley reactions/ review

(the first edition of Nigthmare Alley)

I finally saw Guillermo del Toro's Nightmare Alley today. I am not upset I did, but I must say, I was much more excited about the film before I saw it; and once I was actually seeing it, I was more excited to be seeing it before it reached its midpoint. Generally a bad thing, though it is not necessarily del Toro's fault, as this sort of mid-point lag in enthusiasm is something that happens often with me with commercial films. I often have higher hopes for them than they end up meeting, and I almost always prefer setups to resolutions, since it is in the resolution that the clunkiest manipulations invariably occur, to compensate for any flaws in the setup. (Alternately, in the event of a flawless setup, the resolution is where a film can start to just feel like the inevitable, clockwork culminations of what has gone before). Setups almost always feel fresh; resolutions almost always feel a little bit like letdowns. They're also a signifier that the film is coming to a close, which is a bummer, since it means the good times are drawing to a close, too!

Anyhow, like I say, it might not be entirely del Toro's fault, but it seems like these feelings - dissatisfaction with the second half, a sense that the film is less than I hoped - apply more than usual to the movie I just watched...

Briefly, if you don't know it, the story of Nightmare Alley - first told in novel form by William Lindsay Gresham and adapted into a film noir, both of which came out in the late 1940s - is that of an ambitious young grifter, a hustler with a troubled childhood who becomes first a carny, and then eventually a successful mentalist (a professional psychic) before his demons (or just desserts) catch up with him. Even though he has a trusting young female assistant he professes to love, he hooks up with a sinister, femme fatale psychiatrist (psychologist?) who gives him access to client information, so he can really pull a deep swindle on the local rich and powerful; one of these swindles turns bad - it isn't much of a spoiler for me to say it, as you can see it coming from afar. Then there is a settling of accounts between the femme fatale and the protagonist. The bookends are also particularly significant: the book begins with the main character observing a degraded alcoholic being used in a geek show, and ends - I guess this must count as a spoiler - with the protagonist signing up, broken, to himself become a geek, the weight of his past failures having proven too much to bear. It's sort of a fatalistic, "character-is-destiny" story, at least as del Toro tells it - which sort of is much more emphasized in the book, which (for instance) names each chapter for one of the major arcana in Tarot - like the story itself is a Tarot reading for the main character/ reader/ all of us.

Before I get to picking at why the film does not entirely live up to the promise of that very interesting-seeming story, let's show del Toro some respect. Akin to Peter Jackson, he has earned a place in mainstream cinema with some very striking films, and while I am not actually a fan of most of them, I love a couple of them (Mimic and Hellboy) enough that I still go see each of his new movies, and often my reaction to them involves respect and admiration - Pan's Labyrinth won both from me - even where it doesn't necessarily ultimately include enjoyment or enthusiasm (I still don't know what I really make of that film, and have still only ever watched it once, first run, which is also true of basically every other del Toro film, except Mimic and Hellboy - and Hellboy II, actually. Otherwise I've just never wanted to re-watch any of his movies, tho' I certainly have liked aspects of all of them - maybe Pacific Rim least of all, but...)

Then, besides his actual movies, and better than them, are the CHOICES behind them, the choices of what to make and why, which I applaud. Like, I didn't care very much about The Shape of Water, first time out, and also haven't tried it a second time - it is the del Toro I am most likely to revisit one of these days - but I also do feel like, because of it, a whole generation of young moviegoers know and care about The Creature from the Black Lagoon who had no reason to before. Yay for that - as a big Creature fan, I love that lots of people DID like that film even if I didn't (and love Abe Sapien, too!) - but it's also not just about consequences: regardless of the effect he had, I respect and honour his desire to MAKE an homage to The Creature from the Black Lagoon in the first place - even if he was picking that film purely selfishly, as an expression of his own love for that movie, without a single thought for influencing young movie goers, preserving the past of horror cinema, or enhancing popular film culture, I approve. He's picking very good things to love, things worthy of being passed down/ revitalized/ revisited/ repackaged/ resold to us. I don't want to seem like an ingrate! 

And indeed, Nightmare Alley (the book AND the original film) is a very good thing to love, a choice that speaks well of him as a filmmaker which also will have good effects on cinemagoers learning about this story for the first time. And there is some magical stuff in the first half of del Toro's Nightmare Alley, evoking the world of the carnival. There is a scene where the geek gets lose, and Willem Dafoe (as his keeper) and Bradley Cooper (the main character, here a novice to the carnival) go hunting for him with flashlights in the rain, which is a feat of production design, pacing, and camerawork, especially as the chase ends up in an amazingly-designed "Damnation"-themed carnival ride, one of those Geisterbahn-type things that Billy Hopeless is so fond of, where you sit in an automated cart and go through a series of displays designed to scare you, monsters popping up and so forth. This sequence looks great, and is, I would guess, the stuff that drew del Toro to the story (tho' as with the film's Tarot references, there is probably more to be made, thematically, of that particular ride than del Toro accomplishes; potent as it is visually, the thematic resonance seems to fall a bit short). There is also a memorably ugly chicken-geeking, a striking double-jointed dance from the Snake Man, and much else to keep your eyes happy in the film's first half. And while I eventually overdosed on the star power in the film, as I discovered that every single face of a main character was familiar except Mark Povenelli, the Major, I consistently enjoy watching the work of Ron Perlman, Toni Colette, David Strathairn, Willem Dafoe, and even Arthur from Peaky Blinders, Paul Anderson - who was actually unrecognizable as the geek!

What else did I like about the film? There are a couple of moments where Bradley Cooper actually seems well-cast. When he hustles a sheriff - Jim Beaver, whom you will recognize from various long-form TV shows he's done, including Deadwood - into not shutting down the carnival, you believe the glitter in his eyes, his inward delight at being able to pull one over on someone so thoroughly. Cooper is generally well-suited to playing a con artist, and I am predisposed to like him, having greatly enjoyed him in The Midnight Meat Train, Limitless and even in Joe Carnahan's idiotically entertaining A-Team feature (an unlikely recommendation from me, but there it is. They fly a tank!).

Mostly though, to talk about Cooper in this film, I have to switch gears and talk about the bad of Nightmare Alley, because the film never really gets to recover from the fact that COOPER IS TOO OLD FOR THE ROLE. Certainly in the first half of the film - where he begins as "the Fool" in the Tarot, at least in the book - its clear just from the context of the film that this is supposed to be a much younger man, someone maybe in his 20's or 30's, starting out his (fool's) journey. Cooper is 47 - maybe 46 when the film was being shot  - and looks every year of it. It's like having Mel Gibson play Hamlet (a forgotten film, but it actually happened - and critics complained about Mel being too old for the role, though he was only 34 at the time); it's just not credible casting, and the film makes no effort to make him look younger - he doesn't even shave off his trademark stubble. Because of this fundamental mistake, you never really buy into this as being the arc of someone's life, which is my impression is sorta what you're supposed to do; which means it fails to resonate on the archetypal level, Cooper's progress from being The Fool to The Hanged Man; in fact, not enough is made of the Fool, considering the Cooper-character is so strongly identified with him in the book, when we first meet him.

...And as I say, I also wore out on the starpower. Cate Blanchett I was prepared for - playing the role less as a human and more as an archetype - but it started to feel, as new cast members turned up, like we were in the grips some sort of weird, showoffy egomania on del Toro's part ("YOU WILL RECOGNIZE EVERY FACE IN MY MOVIE! LOOK HOW MANY ACTORS WILL COME TO WORK WITH ME! KNEEL BEFORE ME IN AWE, MWAH HAH HAAAA!"). It's not that I minded the cast, and I'm am truly glad that Mary Steenburgen, Peter MacNeill, Richard Jenkins, Tim Blake Nelson and Holt McCallany are appearing in a high-profile, at least half-good, semi-successful film, because they are all actors I like and respect - but most major films have two or three familiar faces in them at best. When you recognize everyone in the film - it's kind of like having cake for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, if you see what I mean.  It also guarantees that there are very few fresh discoveries to be had.

(Oh, and can the next filmmaker to use him maybe see what Holt looks like in a non-Mindhunter haircut? It is a cool haircut but it's getting to be a Bronson moustache, and someone needs to Indian Runner him, so you don't suddenly feel like the movie you are watching is about to turn into an FBI profiler story)

The other annoyance for me is that - tho' I have not finished Gresham's novel - I noticed that there were a few scenes where information essential to a bit of dialogue got thinned out to the point of compromising the scene/ scuttling the meaning. Take, for example, when Willem Dafoe explains to Cooper how to get a man to geek. According to the book, the trick is to find a "one bottle a day alcoholic," promise him booze, then give him a temporary job "faking" geekery; he won't have to actually bite the heads off any chickens, tell him - they'll hide some razorblades on him so he can make it look good and bloody. As long as he is doing the temporary job, you give him his bottle a day, but eventually you tell him you need to find a real geek, someone who will actually do the biting. Faced with the loss of his bottle and bed and security, "he'll geek." 

Now, the screenwriters do add a couple of interesting details to this - changing the one-bottle-a-day drunk to a two-bottle-a-day drunk, I guess since ideas of how bad addiction can be have progressed since the 1940s, and suggesting that you add a drop of tincture of opium to the bottle you give the geek every day. Those are welcome additions, making the whole processes of training a man to geek seem that much more cruel and cunning. But making sense of the scene ABSOLUTELY requires that you understand the difference between real geeking (with your teeth) and faking it (with razorblades): AND THIS CRUCIAL BIT OF INFORMATION IS LEFT OUT. Willem Dafoe has a line about "fake geeks," but there's no explanation of what faking it might entail, no mention of the razorblade cheat, so you're left puzzled by the scene. Scenes of explanation should not, ideally, leave you puzzled. And as a result of this obvious, if tiny, bit of dialogue misfire, later, when I got confused by other exchanges in the film, feeling like I'd missed something - it's a feeling that comes up a few times - I wondered if it was for precisely the same reason: something essential being left out at the writing phase...? 

Finally: I have no great knowledge about del Toro, but you start to think his ambition is to be the Douglas Sirk of horror - like he's been watching all these Todd Haynes films that mimic a distant cinematic sense of craft and colour, and is trying to do the same thing, developing a signature "eye." I have nothing wrong with that, per se - and though I didn't much care for The Shape of Water, I did like how it looked, a look which fit the material. But the second half of Nightmare Alley asks us to invest in a very short time period in some fairly complex, unusual characters (Cate Blanchett's, Richard Jenkins'), and to take us down some fairly emotionally tortured roads, and it started to feel like del Toro was lacking in getting us to buy into them - not really even trying all that hard, maybe because his idea of cinema is more about images and editing and camerawork and less about character and dialogue and emotional truth (you know Mojo Nixon's declamation that Michael J. Fox has no Elvis in him? Guillermo del Toro has zero Cassavetes). He proceeds from image to image, uniformly beautiful and aesthetically loaded, following the classic rhythms of Hollywood, and I just sort of glazed over, not entering ANY of it as much as I wanted to, floating with the filmmaker on the surface of things. The carnival half of the film offers us a visually interesting world, so it befits a visually-oriented filmmaker, but the last half of the film requires us to feel ensnared by the psychology of the characters, both gripped and horrified. There were a couple of moments that worked - Mary Steenburgen's big scene is pretty great - but more often than not, I had no idea why the characters did what they did or how I was supposed to feel about it. Why does Cate betray Bradley, again, after co-operating with him? Just to amuse herself? Is she really just a femme fatale stereotype with no need for deeper character motivations? And why was it that Bradley had poisoned Pete? We only learn about it late in the film, though it is set up early; but he had seemed to love the guy, so it ends up more puzzling than satisfying, the explanation kind of buried so you don't make too much of it. Strangest of all, I cannot in the slightest recall what happens to Rooney Mara in the film. The young girl that Cooper seduces into his conman's life is a main character, so we should feel something when her storyline ends, but for the life of me I can't recall how that happens: does she leave him? Does he kill her? It's startling to me that such a major development in a story left no imprint at all upon my memory; it feels like if I were properly invested in the character, I would remember what happened to her.

And not only does the character motivation get a bit obscured by the seamless progress from image to image, the rather relentlessly-paced, formulaic ending also seems not to do justice to the profundities of the story; there's no space to pause and wonder what any of this means for ourselves - just the clutch of image-propelled narrative, paced like any of a billion Hollywood films, which kind of keeps the film from realizing its most profound implications... am I the fool? Do I deserve a life of geekery? What role was I born to play? You feel like the story is meant to leave you contemplating these questions, but instead, you'll likely walk out of the theatre like you've seen a Marvel movie, asking no questions whatsoever. Something feels lacking in that. It's too rich (and too dark) a source text to not leave you more troubled by its implications. 

In the end, I am glad that Guillermo del Toro made Nightmare Alley, but mostly so that a whole new generation might discover the book and/or the original version of the film (I'm told it is better, but I wanted to see the del Toro first, so...). I did like parts of the film, but I left wishing I'd liked it a whole lot more. I gather it is being re-released in black and white, but I don't think that that's going to fix any of the issues at all...