Nightmare Alley is a movie that stays with you. Maybe I’m a sucker for this sort of material, but I found it profoundly unsettling and meaningful, a frightening glimpse into a shadowy place in our collective national psyche. Directed by Guillermo Del Toro, this unusual work is as difficult to classify as it is to shake off, blending elements of film noir and Grimm’s fairy tale. The final product chronicles the misadventures of a kind of reverse Icarus: the man who dove too deep.
Something about this film is distinctly American, which is all the more impressive given that its director is Mexican and is best known for Spanish language films. Del Toro has grabbed and pulled a thread that weaves through American literary classics like Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathaniel West and cinematic masterpieces like Rear Window (1954). These works are about the hidden inner lives of our neighbors. And when those hidden lives are exposed, they don’t answer our questions but instead gesture toward an endless darkness just out of view.
We witness this darkness by way of a road show’s “mentalizing” act, a kitschy hand-waving routine that evokes audience members’ emotional memories. Protagonist Stanley Carlisle (Bradley Cooper), a natural showman, grows impatient with his fellow performers’ restraint in using the mentalizing techniques. While they worry that allowing the performance to escalate to a “spook show” will have damaging psychological consequences for everyone, Carlisle sees an opportunity to widen the scope (and revenue) of his act by ratcheting up the emotional stakes. He eventually leaves the road show to launch a successful career of his own in the city without the confines of his friends’ trepidation.
In other words, as in any good fairy tale, Pandora’s box is opened—and, as advertised, there’s evil inside. By the climax, when Carlisle finds himself acting on his own tormenting trauma, the situation has become so out of control that it could legitimately be characterized as (very) dark comedy. Nobody in this film wins: an adversary (Cate Blanchett, doing a passable Faye Dunaway) does get the best of Carlisle, but we can’t even take heart in her triumph, as all she can muster as a victory cry is: “I’ll live.” The spirit of film noir, alive and well!
Del Toro isn’t the master stylist that he was when he made Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), and this film could have been elevated higher by that kind of visual wizardry. He summons it only at lulls, such as with dusky faraway shots of the road show. But the relatively functional camerawork succeeds, intentionally or otherwise, in emphasizing the noir components compared to the fantasy ones, strengthening the depressing, deflating tone of the material.
Also helpful to Del Toro’s aims is the performance of Cooper, who, with his rough features and anxious glare, has always seemed a bit out of place on the A-list, always working a bit too hard—the mark of the social climber. Del Toro’s first choice was Leo Dicaprio, who would have brought a different angle entirely. It makes you think: what would The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) have been like with Cooper in the lead?
If only Stanley Carlisle were a salesman. Instead, he has the misfortune of being a “born” performer, and he learns the hard way that at the core of any performance is self-abasement: as Willem Dafoe’s character knowingly advises early on, an ego boost is the purest form of entertainment, and it’s made clear, as our anti-Icarus rises back to the surface for good, that the freak show will never go out of style.
What about us, then, watching these maniacs destroy one another?
–Jim Andersen
For more reviews, check out my review of King Richard.