Film review

  • Nightmare Alley

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Guillermo del Toro (2021)

    William Lindsay Gresham’s novel Nightmare Alley very soon became a Hollywood picture:  Edmund Goulding’s noir, starring Tyrone Power as the anti-hero Stanton Carlisle, appeared in 1947, the year after the book’s publication.  Guillermo del Toro, in an interview with Andrew Male in Sight & Sound (Winter 2021-22), is clear about his and co-writer Kim Morgan’s priorities in shaping the material for the screen a second time:  ‘The first thing we said was, “Let’s not look at the first movie” … because we were not doing a remake.  Researching Gresham became the thing. …. We came to the conclusion that Nightmare Alley is very much “The Spiritual Autobiography of William Lindsay Gresham”’.  There’s a lot to admire and be entertained by in del Toro’s film but also reason to suspect (I haven’t read the book) that his regard for the original, and the abundance of craft and talent on display in this adaptation, inflate Nightmare Alley into something it isn’t.  And del Toro, accomplished storyteller though he is, takes too long to tell the story of Stan Carlisle.

    The warning signs of that are soon in evidence.  Stan’s sinister progress begins, late in the Depression years, at a travelling show.  When he first arrives there, at the end of a long bus journey, it’s after nightfall and the lights of the carnival shine in the darkness – a bit like the neon sign for Bates Motel.  Stan (Bradley Cooper) gets work as a ‘carny’ after helping to limit damage from the storm raging that night.  The carnival design and décor are terrific:  the more you see of the place, the more you want to see, and so does del Toro.  He’s a great admirer of Tod Browning’s shocking Freaks (1932) and his own films, right through to The Shape of Water (2017), have majored in monsters.  In Nightmare Alley, del Toro lingers on the bizarre exhibits of the so-called ‘Odd-i-torium’ – the Snake Man, the Spider Woman, the Cyclops baby pickled in a jar.  He dwells on details of the ‘mind-reading’ techniques of the carnival’s long-running clairvoyant act, the elderly alcoholic Pete Krumbein (David Strathairn) and his wife ‘Madame’ Zeena (Toni Collette) – techniques in which Stan proves an apt pupil.

    Knowing he’s meant for better things, Stan is quickly ambitious to make a more lucrative living.  He falls for another artiste in the company, Molly Cahill (Rooney Mara), and she with him.  They leave the carnival to become partners on stage and off.   Two years later, in 1941, Stan, assisted by Molly, is a successful high-end mentalist in Buffalo, New York, though still using the methods he learned from Zeena and Pete.  One night, a member of the audience in the club where he’s performing, tries to expose him as a fraud.  Psychologist Dr Lilith Ritter (Cate Blanchett) is elegant, well connected and possessor of a significant forename.  Its she-devil connotations bespeak a darker archetypal threat than that of Adam’s better-known wife, the straightforward woman-as-temptress.  Stan gets the better of Lilith when she calls him out in the club but the encounter proves fateful.  It leads, convolutedly, to his eventual downfall.

    Gresham (the first husband of Joy Davidman, who later married C S Lewis) wrote the novel ‘while working as an editor for a “true crime” pulp magazine in New York City during the 1940s’ (Wikipedia).  The word ‘pulp’ comes up plentifully in online searches for Nightmare Alley.  This isn’t to disparage the book but it does suggest an approach and a style very different from those of the film.  Even if del Toro and Kim Morgan are right that it’s Gresham’s ‘spiritual autobiography’, this is presumably something inferred from, rather than explicit in, the novel.  Gresham may well have been self-revealing in Nightmare Alley but it seems he revealed himself underneath pulpy characters and a sensational storyline.  Neither of those adjectives applies to the picture del Toro has made.  The lighting (by Dan Laustsen) and production design (Tamara Deverell and Shane Vieau) are superbly expressive.  We see Stan moving through the carnival ‘House of Damnation’ with its tunnel of watching eyes and, later on, down ornate corridors to Lilith’s lair – both seem to represent psychic states as much as they are physical locations.   Yet the ingenious images contribute to an atmosphere that’s plush rather than pulp.  The tempo suggests a respectful adaptation of a classic rather than a cult novel.

    The de luxe quality comes through even more insistently in del Toro’s stellar cast.  It may sound silly to suggest that the film could have been more effective with inferior actors but I think it’s true.  You get a sense of performers too richly gifted for, and who therefore tend to overwork, their relatively rough-hewn characters (though Gresham came up with some fine names for these).  It’s fascinating to watch this happening but it still feels wrong.  Cate Blanchett’s command and finesse are awesome:  her face, voice and gestures combine to create a technically astounding distillation of Hollywood femme fatales.  But awareness of the actress’s brilliance puts distance between the woman she’s playing and the viewer, and there’s no heat in Lilith’s affair with Stan.  Toni Collette overplays her first scene, as Zeena, getting to know Stan, flatters and fondles him while he takes a bath in the Krumbeins’ shack.  Rooney Mara is a different matter – she just seems miscast:  her Molly isn’t sufficiently naïve in the early stages.

    In the lead, Bradley Cooper gives a less ostentatious performance – in fact, he’s at his least persuasive as Stan the showman.  Cooper’s luminous eyes serve him well, suggesting a nature sensitive as well as scheming, and he makes Stan’s final abjection powerful.  The travelling show personnel also include Willem Dafoe and Ron Perlman:  as Clem Hoately, the carnival owner, Dafoe could do to be morally grungier; Perlman, as Clem’s brutish sidekick, has ugly menace to spare.  Stan acquires wealthy Buffalo clients through Lilith, whose patients they’ve been.  (Stan can pass off as mentalist perception the information he gleans from the patient files that Lilith lets him see.)  These monied stooges are mired in grief or guilt from long-ago traumas and desperate to communicate with their late loved ones.  Judge Kimball (Peter MacNeill) and his wife Felicia (Mary Steenburgen) lost their son in the Great War.  As a college student, tycoon Ezra Grindle (Richard Jenkins) forced his sweetheart into the abortion that resulted in her death.  Mary Steenburgen delivers the single most startling moment in Nightmare Alley when Felicia, convinced by Stan that the Kimballs’ son awaits them in the hereafter, is so impatient for the family reunion that she smilingly shoots dead her husband then puts a bullet intp her own brain.  In contrast, the climax to the more elaborate conning of Grindle, whose suspicious wingman (Holt McCallany) does his ill-fated best to thwart Stan, is gruesomely extended.

    Bradley Cooper benefits from, as well as a big finish, an intriguing start.  Stan doesn’t speak throughout his first ten or so minutes on screen, which increases our curiosity about him.  He needs this, though, to counteract the film’s opening sequence.  Stan is first seen dragging a corpse through a room in a house which he sets fire to, before walking off to catch his bus into the future.  In other words, it’s a man with an evidently shady past – rather than a mystery man from nowhere – who turns up at the travelling show.  The corpse, it later transpires, was his alcoholic father, whom Stan murdered.  At the carnival, he’s unintentionally responsible for the death of another dipso father figure, when he gives Pete Krumbein, by mistake, a bottle of wood alcohol.  On Lilith’s psychiatrist’s couch, Stan reveals his hatred of his father and his guilt about what happened to Pete.  A recent online review of Nightmare Alley by Dan Schindel[1] describes Gresham’s novel as ‘a fascinating integration of Freudian psychological frameworks into the pulp paperback world’ but notes too that the new film ‘replaces Gresham’s dime-store Freud with contemporary cinematic one-to-one psychoanalysis’.  This is right enough – and del Toro’s deferential treatment of the source material reinforces a fundamental difficulty with rebooting Nightmare Alley as a big, commercially ambitious movie.

    The novel is (Dan Schindel again) ‘equal parts thriller and exposé, pulling down the mystique that had long been built up by freak shows and carnival con artists’.  Gresham may have exploited the persisting grip of that mystique, rather than dismantled it, but the grip has continued to weaken in the years between the first film of Nightmare Alley and this one.  (The same could be said of Freudian theory, which ruled the psychological roost in America, including Hollywood, in the 1940s and 1950s.)  What might be called supernatural show business is still popular today but, since most people now assume its practitioners to be using tricks of the trade rather than special powers, the exposé element of Nightmare Alley has lost any traction it might once have had with audiences (who’ve not been flocking to see del Toro’s film).  In the last part of the narrative, Stan has evaded arrest but has lost Lilith, Molly, a roof over his head and his self-respect.  He has abandoned the sobriety in which he once took defensive pride.  He stumbles into what may or may not be another carnival – different management but the same Cyclops baby in evidence – in the hope of reviving his career.  The owner (Tim Blake Nelson) isn’t interested:  he tells Stan that mentalism is now old hat.  This brief put-down (which is confusing since it’s unclear how much time has passed since mind-reading was all the rage) is as far as del Toro gets in acknowledging changing public tastes.

    When Clem Hoately first takes him on, Stan helps his employer to dispose of the current carnival ‘geek’, who has outlived his usefulness.  This half-man-half-beast attraction that bites off the heads of live chickens is – a key post requirement – really a broken-down drunk fed opium-tinctured alcohol to anaesthetise his wretched existence.  The carny boss at the other end of Nightmare Alley finally takes pity on Stan, offering him a tryout as the show’s new geek, with a regular supply of booze.  No clairvoyance is required on the viewer’s part to know from a long way out that this is how hubristic Stan’s tale will end.  Still, Bradley Cooper makes a splendid job of accepting the job offer.  ‘Mister,’ Stan replies, laughing through his tears, ‘I was born for it’.

    24 January 2022

    [1]  At https://www.massive-cinema.com/storyboard/freak-show-nightmare-alley

     

     

  • The Last Metro

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Le dernier métro

    François Truffaut (1980)

    François Truffaut’s article ‘A Certain Tendency in French Cinema’, published in Cahiers du cinéma in 1954, was instantly controversial and helped sow the seeds of the French New Wave and the auteur theory of film-making.   Truffaut’s targets in ‘A Certain Tendency’ were ‘la tradition de qualité’ and ‘le cinéma de papa’.  He praised the small group of French directors[1] whose personal vision and style transcended the suffocating conventions of national cinema.  Within a few years, Truffaut was making films, each one an exultant proof of his own individuality – The 400 Blows (1959), Shoot the Pianist (1960), Jules and Jim (1962).  Two decades later, he was, like it or not, part of the French cinema establishment.  The Last Metro proved to be one of his biggest commercial successes, in France and internationally.  The direction, design and performances are very smoothly orchestrated.  To use Truffaut’s own pejorative, the film reeks of ‘qualité’, and doesn’t amount to much.

    The setting of The Last Metro (which Truffaut wrote with Suzanne Schiffman and Jean-Claude Grumberg) is a Paris theatre in 1942.  The film’s title – an appealing one, though it has little significance in the story that follows – refers to the curfew that operated throughout the German Occupation, obliging theatre audiences to hurry to catch the last train home.  The Théâtre Montmartre is owned by a married couple, Lucas and Marion Steiner.  Before the Occupation, he directed the plays there; she was, and remains, the leading lady.  Lucas is Jewish and assumed now to have fled Paris, leaving gentile Marion (Catherine Deneuve) in charge.  In fact, Lucas (Heinz Bennent) is living in hiding in the theatre cellar, where he and his wife regularly spend time together, making love and discussing the upcoming production of a Norwegian play called ‘Disappearance’.  Bernard Granger (Gérard Depardieu), a rising star of the Paris stage, joins the company to play the male lead in ‘Disappearance’ opposite Marion, unaware that Lucas is on hand to direct the play.  Bernard doesn’t notice that Marion is immediately attracted to him.  She doesn’t know that, outside rehearsals, Bernard’s a member of the Resistance.

    The film’s opening scene and its delayed punchline set the tone.  En route to the Théâtre Montmartre for a first meeting with Marion, Bernard enthusiastically tries to pick up a woman (Andréa Ferrol) in the street.  She gives him the brush-off repeatedly and disappears into the place where he’s heading:  the woman turns out to be Arlette, the company’s wardrobe mistress, who’s revealed to be lesbian.  Forty years on, Bernard’s chat-up routine and the comic payoff aren’t likely to be found as, respectively, endearing and amusing as Truffaut meant them to be, but I hope they wouldn’t have made me laugh even in 1980.  You certainly don’t need to be woke to yawn at them now.   As well as Arlette, notable members of the Théâtre Montmartre include Jean-Loup (Jean Poiret), the gay assistant director who wants to keep on the right side of both Marion and his German contacts; the harassed, hard-working technician Raymond (Maurice Risch); and Germaine (Paulette Dubost), a similarly long-serving, backstage unsung heroine who lives for the place.  Sadine Haudepin (who played the little girl in Jules and Jim) is another of the actresses in the company.  All these characters are perfectly well played but Truffaut insists on their being innocuous – to tiresome effect.   The one astringent presence is the anti-semitic collaborationist Daxiat (Jean-Louis Richard), though I was never clear if he was a newspaper owner or a theatre critic (or both).  Daxiat’s threat to take over the Théâtre Montmartre is a doubly puzzling strand of the story:  when he makes the threat, you wonder why he didn’t do so before; once he’s made it, it fizzles out.

    Gérard Depardieu’s easy command is quite something.  The more quietly nuanced Heinz Bennent also does fine work.  Catherine Deneuve is as glamorously inexpressive as ever.  It’s an effective touch that Lucas, who hears rehearsals in the cellar through a heating vent, intuits that his wife is in love with Bernard; and Truffaut closes the film with a thoroughly successful coup de théâtre.  Bernard has decided to give up acting for the duration and work full-time for the Resistance.  He and Marion make love just before he leaves the theatre.  A few moments later, Truffaut cuts to a hospital ward, where an injured Bernard lies in bed and Marion visits him, then reveals this to be the closing scene of a play that Lucas wrote in the cellar, and which is now being staged post-Occupation.  The audience, in which Nazi uniforms are now conspicuous by their absence, applauds.  Lucas joins Marion and Bernard on stage.  The three sides of the love triangle that’s taken shape now are de-constructed as the trio takes a curtain call.  It’s a witty, graceful conclusion – yet weightless, too.

    It wouldn’t be fair to describe The Last Metro as impersonal.  It reflects Truffaut’s warm feelings for the theatre and theatre people as Day for Night did for cinema and those involved in creating it.  Just as ‘Meet Pamela’, the movie in production in Day for Night, looked duff, so the play being prepared and performed in The Last Metro sounds dire.  It’s true the Théâtre Montmartre’s choice of ‘Disappearance’ makes a political point, too – the piece is considered by the Nazis racially irreproachable.  Even so, the mediocrity that ‘Disappearance’ and ‘Meet Pamela’ share seems meant to illustrate the depth of Truffaut’s affection for the medium he’s portraying:  theatre, like film, is an invaluable good in itself and the merit of any particular play or movie is relatively unimportant.  This isn’t the view Truffaut took as an often boldly deprecatory critic in the 1950s and I doubt it’s what impelled him to become a film-maker.  The Last Metro can be seen as his celebration of theatrical pretence and human resilience just as Day for Night is considered his ‘love letter to the cinema’.  But Truffaut expressed his love of the medium, and of people, more powerfully and memorably by making a film like The 400 Blows.

    21 January 2022

    [1] Jacques Becker, Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau, Abel Gance, Roger Leenhardt, Max Ophuls, Jean Renoir and Jacques Tati.

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