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