Though most of his films are genre riffs reinterpreted and reimagined through his darkened and distorted lens, Guillermo del Toro’s few true-blue adaptations are most informative about his evolution as a filmmaker. The Hellboy films and, now, Nightmare Alley, a remake of the 1947 Edmund Goulding film noir classic/adaptation of the gothic thriller of the same name by William Lyndsey Gresham, act as a sort of mile marker for his career, at least in Hollywood. Hellboy was the kind of film one would expect from a wunderkind dropped into the studio system, a compromised yet interesting vision saddled with script notes and one-liners but elevated by its casting and incredible SFX work. When it came time to make the sequel, del Toro was fresh off of the success of Pan’s Labyrinth, which earned him his first Oscars and true critical recognition, he was able to make it his way, indulging in the kind of broad, aesthetically-engaging spectacle, full of both emotional intelligence and visual mastery, that would define the next decade of his work. With Nightmare Alley, however, we see a filmmaker who has climbed the career mountaintop — his last film, The Shape of Water, won Best Picture (and is still a good movie, I don’t care to hear differently) and his works are well-known and lauded by most – and has subsequently lost some amount of perspective. If there’s one word that best describes this 150-minute behemoth, it’s “overindulgence.” It is the most Guillermo del Toro movie that Guillermo del Toro has made yet, which is, as you might expect, a bit of a mixed bag, especially since, by its very nature, it’s being compared to a classic.
Nightmare Alley documents the rise (and fall) of Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper, taking over the role that Tyrone Power played in the original), a carny with dreams of fame and fortune and who is possessed with the drive to realize it. He sees his opportunity in the form of a retired act that two mentalists — Zeena (Toni Colette), the on-stage public face of the pair, and Pete (David Strathairn), the crumbling alcoholic who supplies her the answers to the personal questions she’s asked by audiences via a trick mirror — perfected decades ago, once they were famous. It’s a skilled act involving observation and language, which Del Toro and co-writer Kim Morgan threaten to overexplain here, but if it’s done right, it can seem imperceptible to the human ear (and eye) from the supernatural. Pete offers to teach Stanton the ways of the act, and he does so, but one night the drunken old man drinks some wood alcohol thinking it’s his nightly bottle of liquor — provided to him by the ambitious carny — and bites the dust. In the following months, Stanton makes plans for his getaway and begins to train Molly (Rooney Mara), who stars as the Carnival’s “electrical” girl, in the ways of the act, and the pair eventually make their way out of the big-top and into big city ballrooms, entertaining crowds with their skills.
Two years pass. Stanton and Molly have perfected their act and become semi-famous stars: they live in a fancy hotel and make plenty of money, especially for the late-depression era, but Stanton wants something more. He’s given his chance when, in front of an audience, his abilities are questioned by a psychiatrist named Lillith Ritter (Cate Blanchett), and he manages to both use his guile and wit to impress the woman and get her to join up in some of his schemes. You see, it’s important for the mentalist to remember that his act is an illusion and not offer services like “summoning ghosts” or “really communicating with the dead,” but Stanton’s on a power trip. He successfully cons a couple using information given to him by Ritter, who records every one of her sessions with her clients and prepares to do his biggest job yet: Helping Ezra Grindle (Richard Jenkins), a disgruntled old millionaire commune with his long-dead love. In doing so, he’ll discover just how good of a con man he really is, as well as feel what it’s like to be conned, and potentially face the consequences of his actions. The only question is how many people he’ll take with him on his fall from glory.
Befitting a director who just came off of a semi-surprise Oscar win for a movie about a woman raw-dogging the Creature from the Black Lagoon’s distant cousin, Del Toro takes his time developing his story, expanding upon the length of the original film by some 40 minutes, most of which takes the form of an engorged first act. This approach has its upsides, one of which is that he’s able to luxuriate in the carnival aesthetic, which is expertly realized with a kind of vivid truer-than-true iconography by his production designers. He’s delighted by the Grand Guignol morbidity of the Freak Show, with his camera gliding gently through striped tents and past a variety of color-enhancing attractions, and, thematically, he loves the seedy underbelly beneath these cruelties presented to unsuspecting marks as morality plays. This passion is so strong that it nearly derails the first hour of the film: not only do we watch the genesis of Stanton Carlisle from a meek-minded man on the run to improbable downtown dining hall draw — elements exclusively added to the narrative by del Toro and Morgan, against the framework provided by both the novel and the original film — but the exoticism of the setting, with this kind of carnival having faded well into the past, proves nearly impossible for del Toro to draw his eyes away from, even at the expense of his storytelling and pacing.
This kind of nostalgia-driven aestheticism is an interesting phenomenon in modern remakes, especially since one might be able to just walk down the multiplex hall and go into a theater playing another film suffering from similar issues in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story. The prior versions of both of these films were documenting vaguely contemporary environments with which the audience had a manner of familiarity: They were simply exaggerated versions of locales that viewers would be familiar with even if they hadn’t actually attended them. As such, they didn’t need to be detail-rich in the same way as these modern period-pieces do, and perhaps this immediacy allowed for directors and writers to focus more heavily on the fundamentals (then again, even the period pieces in the Old Hollywood often concerned themselves little with the specifics of history for the sake of good storytelling). But both del Toro and Spielberg can’t help themselves, and so you wind up with often beautiful and “accurate” stylizations of the time periods that their works are set in at the expense of so much else, even with the sturdy backbone provided by adaptation. Even the foregrounding of “relevant” contemporary details — the development of Lincoln Center in West Side Story, or World War II here – feels pained and aimless even if the directors are trying to stress their thematic relevance.
It feels like the passing references to Hitler or the fact that one of the big events in the second hour takes place on December 7, 1941, are attempts on del Toro’s part to suggest a metaphorical link between the Con Man and the Strong Man, but Cooper’s casting and Carlisle’s characterization both leave something to be desired. Saddled with a McConaccent (alright alright alright) and a doe-eyed look of stunned wonder that barely leaves his face even after he begins his head-first descent into pure corruption, Cooper feels like he has one arm tied behind his back: he works best when he can bring a manic energy to a role (he’s well-suited for comedy, which is why he began there) or a slight bit of toughness (he’s even vaguely intimidating in fucking War Dogs, which is pretty nuts), but in this specifically passive role, in which he’s required to be a hollow and fearful man motivated only by the craven accumulation of wealth and women. This Carlisle isn’t confident enough to justify his slippery status nor are his actions given the weight of intention: del Toro adds a pained ambiguity about Carlisle’s actions and the “murder” that sets off the film’s plot, which is an odd thing to do when paired with this characterization. Then, when Blanchett enters the picture and begins psychoanalyzing Cooper’s character once he begins plotting his latest schemes — delightful sequences written with punch and panache that, had you come in at the 50-minute mark, one might assume they were watching a capital-G Great neo-noir — it’s hard not to wish that Carlisle were a stronger force to be reckoned with, given how quickly he cracks under scrutiny.
Perhaps Del Toro didn’t want to frontload his ensemble, given just how big it is here, but I don’t know if a compelling protagonist had to be the sacrificial lamb for the others to thrive. They do though, as the constellation of character actors and larger names make a significantly more interesting impact than Cooper does. Blanchett is the standout, with her icy demeanor and cruel wit echoing the great femme fatales of film noirs past, but most of the top-line supporting cast gets a moment to show off their talents. An example: Willem Dafoe, playing the carnival’s manager/geek wrangler, gets a few fantastic scenes, including one, set in a diner after he and Cooper have just thrown their diseased live-chicken-eater in front of a Salvation Army hospital for care and his prompt and inconspicuous disposal, in which he outlines the process in which a carnie finds himself a geek in the wild and chemically trains him into depravity that is significantly scarier and more depraved than any glass-jarred fetus Del Toro could imagine. Jenkins is also swell, presenting the kind of rich heavy that you’d expect in one of these films in a new light: A tough sociopathic businessman almost entirely motivated by a tragedy in his past that has curdled his soul into a kind of narcissistic detachment from anything around him. But true proper praise should be given to Straterhain, who turns a slightly-one note alcoholic character from the original film into a person, endowed by del Toro and Morgan with warmth, sweetness, and deep sadness, all of which give him a real weight.
Beyond the performances from the supporting cast and Del Toro’s bliss at being able to work with an aesthetic so purely well-suited to his cinematic skill set, there’s not really much more in this Nightmare Alley that can’t be found in the original. Well, that’s not totally true: There’s also the matter of the ending, which hews closer to the book’s than the Hays Code would have allowed a film to do in 1947, and is delightful in its own right here. But perhaps it may have had more punch if it had been given to a character worthy of such an iconic and interesting ending, in a story that was more concerned with its mechanics than its looks or was concise enough to be able to do both without testing one’s patience. For a dude whose entire career has been comprised of passion projects, it feels strange to accuse a filmmaker like del Toro of self-indulgence, given how he’s been able to temper it successfully in films large and small. Yet perhaps he should have trusted something other than his gut, right as it often is, and found a temperate middle-ground between his various excesses, which, ironically enough, is kind of the point of this very film. Confidence is key, but one must be aware of what might lie behind the doors that it unlocks.