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Of Grifters and Spook Shows: Guillermo del Toro's Vivid, Blistering Noir


Nightmare Alley is a title that could only belong to a Guillermo del Toro movie. And yet the movie it does belong to doesn’t really feel like the movie it should. It conjures an idea of exactly the kind of foul horror del Toro is fond of: a cornucopia of monsters and ghosts and demons. Maybe it is Cronos and The Devil’s Backbone and Hellboy thrown in a blender with that At the Mountains of Madness adaptation he never got to make. Nightmare Alley however, is nothing like that. It is a film noir, a thriller set in a world of carnies and con artists, about ambition and corruption and the price of deceit.
It’s based on a pulp novel by William Lindsay Gresham, previously adapted into a 1947 movie starring Tyrone Power and Joan Blondell. The narrative has a great classical character arc as it interrogates the business of carnival fraudsters and grifter clairvoyants, charting the rise from penniless yokel to showman medium of one Stan Carlisle (Bradley Cooper), a man with a mysterious past involving abuse and patricide.
del Toro begins his film here, Stan burning down his family home and shortly thereafter crossing paths with a travelling carnival. The first exhibition that he witnesses is that of the geek -the squalid feral man who eats live chickens for the crowd’s amusement. It is a grim and dismal, uncomfortable scene, but completely in del Toro’s wheelhouse in its visceral imagery and utter fascination with this enigmatic ‘curiosity’. Stan seems to share that sentiment towards the geek, after he is hired on as a carny by the ostentatious owner Clem (Willem Dafoe) -it is later revealed that Clem entraps and conditions the geeks by abusing and exploiting their alcohol or drug dependencies. Throughout Stan’s time in the carnival, del Toro often deals in such disturbing facets of that environment and atmosphere, reveling in it as the clear source of his captivation with such places. To him, 1930s carnivals are these touring horror shows, mesmerizing but exploitative, exciting yet depraved, where the worst human impulses are allowed to thrive. Clem keeps a collection of deformed fetuses and infants in jars (and I’m sure the one from The Devil’s Backbone is there if you look hard enough), his prized one being a large child with a big third eye in the middle of its’ forehead.
Stan finds a kind of home here nonetheless, particularly in the company of resident fortune teller Madame Zeena (Toni Collette) and cold-reader Pete (David Strathairn), who takes Stan under his wing in the art of the psychic swindle. Much is made though of the dangers in going too far, believing too highly in one’s own talents and performing taboo “spook shows” in which the psychic claims to be in communion with the dead. None of it is real, del Toro frequently illustrates exactly how clairvoyance is faked, and yet that power it amasses is formidable and intoxicating -to the degree it has the same air as a kind of dark magic. As Stan picks up these tricks, he also attains higher status in the carnival and greater ambitions. He romances Molly (Rooney Mara) who performs an electrical act, with the intent of spiriting her out of the circus with him for greener pastures.
Nightmare Alley takes its’ time drawing out this context, these relationships, the atmosphere and this tension for roughly the first hour before shifting gears into Stan’s independent career in a more sophisticated environment -it reminds me a little bit of the forty-five minute prologue in Drive My Car, though del Toro is nowhere as slowly meditative. Everything that happens at the carnival, each experience and interaction that Stan has serves a function or informs his later actions or developing persona. And the contrast of atmospheres highlights two extremely different worlds operating in sync -and at the heart of each, Stan is the same huckster, only he eventually gets to wear a suit and moustache, and perform his fraud for elite politicians and socialites. One of these is psychologist Lilith Ritter, played by a stupendous as usual Cate Blanchett, classy yet conniving, putting on her best femme fatale dressings, and always the powerhouse of any given scene.
It’s this section of the story that, though less grotesque, is successfully darker as it reveals more of Stan’s personality and aims, the places he’s willing to go, to put others, for his own aggrandizement and greed. He is that rare beneficiary of the American Dream, and the film has a lot to say on the subject. Stan’s fame and fortune comes only with shady choices and is built directly on fraud and deceit. Being young and relatively handsome, he also doesn’t have a hard time attracting audiences the way an older Zeena or Ron Perlman’s Bruno the Strong Man might (always nice to see Perlman in a del Toro film, even for just a small part). But of course it’s never enough, he has to keep pushing his chances –the cautionary tale couldn’t be clearer. Stan’s journey is haunted by a kind of permeating determinism that del Toro suffuses with expert precision. The places the story winds up in a final great enterprise to bamboozle a vile eccentric millionaire (Richard Jenkins) and everything that comes out of that is plotted with precision, the final shot may be del Toro’s most impressing since Pan’s Labyrinth.
That may be the only point in the film though where I was all that enamoured with Cooper’s performance, overall weaker in this film than I’d expected and hoped. His southern accent is a particular distraction, sounding a touch too Ted Lasso to wholly work in this discomforting context. I understand del Toro’s reasoning for casting Cooper, chiefly his classical Hollywood good looks, but I can’t help but feel he is a touch miscast for all that rides on this character -rising to the occasion in seldom moments, not for the general duration of the film. His supporting cast is almost uniformly excellent though, the notable I haven’t mentioned yet, Mary Steenburgen, having a small but thoroughly chilling role.
Nightmare Alley looks tremendous too, the production work is about on par with The Shape of Water –I can’t stop thinking about Lilith’s opulent office and the snow falling on her porch overlooking the city just outside; or the image of a woman in white framed against a rich snow-capped garden, her arms covered in blood. Like with everything del Toro makes, there is so much detail and personal passion in every frame. It’s maybe not as ambitious or original or consistently intoxicating as his best films, but it is no less curious or compelling. Contrary to what I said before it does in fact have everything you’d guess from the title: monsters and ghosts and a hideous dread that floods across its’ two and half hours. Indeed, in its’ way, this is a nightmarish film –and one that only del Toro could make.

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