Bradley Cooper is fascinating in ‘Nightmare Alley‘, Guillermo del Toro‘s film, a screen adaptation of a 1946 novel by William Lindsay Gresham and a remake of a 1947 film. The actor who made his name in roles in good-feeling movies seems to be trying in many of his recent films to make us forget the stereotype and to prove that he can play complex, negative, deeply morally corrupt characters.The film begins with a terrifying scene, which should be a warning to the hero’s character, but the sequel is in a completely different register, and for much of the film viewers have to struggle with the instinct to sympathize with him. Guillermo del Toro, who is also the co-author of the screenplay, not only gave the character depth and ambiguity, but also managed to frame it in a parable about the difference between magic and deception, between art and falsehood. Keeping the style of film noir mixed with horror, ‘Nightmare Alley‘ manages to be at the same time a popular film inspired and descending from ‘pulp fiction’ and a moral story without being moralizing. If it had been about half an hour shorter, it would probably have been much higher on my 2021 preferred movies list.
‘Nightmare Alley‘ offers a story of magic and deception, set in a marginal America of the late ’30s. Stanton Carslile, the hero of the film, joins a troupe of traveling fairgrounds, learning from them the secrets of the cheap but spectacular numbers with which they attract their spectators. How much magic and skill is there and how much scam is in what the audience sees? Stanton has no qualms and uses what he has learned to become a ‘mentalist’, with a mixture of personal intuition and a sense of observation combined with deception based on the transmission of information by his partner, Molly. Arriving in the world of the rich, ambitions grow and the crook magician will cross the border into the pseudo-dialogue with the dead, violating the warnings of his mentor. He will find a new partner but maybe an opponent in the psychologist Lilith, a woman with mentalism talents of a different kind, the scientific ones, patronized by Freud’s sofas. His path is littered with corpses, death is constantly present, in reality and in scams. Falling can be faster than ascension, and death may seem like an easy solution to the punishment of those who break the rules of magic.
What I liked. The film is visually appealing. It begins in a world of almost Dickensian misery lit by the lights of the traveling fair, continues in luxury hotel rooms and gilded but never lightened enough mansions of the rich, to descend again to hell together with the main character. All this is enveloped by a nature where when it does not rain heavily or lightning strikes, frozen snow falls. The gallery of actors is formidable and each of them is excellently distributed and directed. I’ve already written about Bradley Cooper. The two women in his life can be characterized one as angelic (played by Rooney Mara), the other evil (named Lilith – the wonderful Cate Blanchett). Willem Dafoe plays a key role whose importance we will understand towards the end and Ron Perlman adds an impressive composition role to his gallery of supporting roles. What I disliked the least. The story is long and too explicit. From one point on I had a feeling of repetition and I started to guess what was coming. Guillermo del Toro has managed to combine the fantastic with the film noir genre at least twice during his film career. The successes were due to the fact that the explanations were largely left to the imagination of the spectators, this being part of the charm of magic. In ‘Nightmare Alley‘ the main theme is moral corruption and scam for which magic is just a pretext. Explaining too much, del Toro cut precisely from the ambiguity that produced thrill in his previous films. Darkness is better suited by fog.