“Nightmare Alley” (2021) is Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham’s novel, not a remake of the 1947 film adaptation starring Tyrone Power. Stan Carlisle (Bradley Cooper) joins a carnival and learns the tricks of the trade until he masters them and feels confident enough to strike out on his own. Two years later, he has a psychic act in Manhattan, but wanders into forbidden territory after a psychiatrist, Dr. Lilith Ritter (Cate Blanchett), challenges the veracity of his act.
“Nightmare Alley” is the first movie that I saw in theaters for 2022, and I was a little gun shy because I was probably one of the few people in the universe who did not love del Toro’s last movie, “The Shape of Water” (2017), but ever since “A Star Is Born” (2018), Cooper can do no wrong (for me, he went from zero to hero). del Toro paid Cooper the highest compliment, “All of a sudden we were on an adventure. I will never shoot a movie the same way.” Cooper changed one of the greatest directors ever. I love an unremittingly bleak film and did not find the two and a half hour run time challenging.
“Nightmare Alley” is a great story that I do not plan to read the novel because based on my brief reading of a novel summary, it appears that I adore del Toro’s departures from the original source material. There is no prose dumping, and if there is, it feels organic. While the protagonist is not an audience surrogate, like him, we enter the strange world of the carnival with conflicting desires: to be amazed and to understand. As he discovers that the supernatural is just a con, del Toro still adds flourishes in the frame’s corners to make the supernatural credible: a red balloon suddenly released and ascending, a flash of light. These touches are not from the performers, but del Toro, who is famous for his supernatural/horror/sci fi elements. He wants the viewers’ hearts and minds to be in a battle like the protagonist. He wants us to ignore our reason.
“Nightmare Alley” is a tragedy because it is the opposite of a Woody Allen film that eschews the idea of God and cosmic justice. Stan wants redemption and believes it can be found in the supernatural con, but because it is a con, it only leaves punishment as real even if that punishment is self-sabotage. He cannot resist the siren song of being seen and understood even if it puts him in danger. Cooper does a great job as a believer in God while also resenting his faith as a con yet he constantly tries to recreate that con to self-soothe with disastrous results. He does so to make money, but by getting others to believe, he assuages himself through their experience. The one aspect that never changes in Stan is his desire to give people, primarily himself, some hope of redemption, which is why he cannot let go of the spiritual con despite all the obstacles. He believes that he is worse than he is. When Stan crosses the path of a truly unrepentant, horrible man and dispatches of him easily once Stan realizes what that man is and the danger that he poses to him and others, I did not have a problem with it. While the book has a different precipitating factor prior to the denouement, I felt as if this change tied into a motivation for why Dr. Ritter would hope that these men would collide-two birds, one stone revenge, but no one should blame Dr. Ritter for his punishment. Without her, Stan would find another way to punish himself. No one can make another do something. Success was uncomfortable. He wanted danger and risk.
I also felt sad that these con people were so alone and at odds with one another when at least in the instance of Dr. Ritter and Stan, they did not have to be except for the desire to win a zero-sum game. “Nightmare Alley” and “Red Rocket” (2021) would make a great double showing as there is a capacity to create community, an opportunity that gets missed when the con goes too far yet it is also the con that unites them and is the foundation of their livelihood. The fairground is a three-dimensional picture book complimenting the iterant preacher chastising their customers for the sins that they commit. Meanwhile in his dreams, flames surround Stan. If you must choose between Mikey, the protagonist, and Stan having your back, you want Stan because he still has capacity for guilt even if it only slows him down.
“Nightmare Alley” gives us bookend depictions of the same man with nothing. I characterized Stan as the Marilyn Munster of the group because he appears normal, but after he permits himself to be stripped of what little that he had, it retroactively made his small kindnesses to someone who could not repay him hit harder: a drag on a cigarette, trying to ensure that someone got out of the rain and initially unwilling to prevent his escape. I wanted to look at the credits and discover that Cooper played both roles, but del Toro did not pull “The Prince of Egypt” (1998) with Val Kilmer pulling double duty as Moses and God. Why does younger Stan do this?
“Nightmare Alley” is set in between two world wars with the backdrop of veterans who cannot regain their footing in the normal world, but veterans are not the only ones who suffer from trauma. The narrative is a that focus on characters who survive trauma, including child and sexual violence, and find unhealthy ways to cope. It a story about not healing from that trauma and not being able to fill the wound, which is what makes it tragic. It is not that Stan is no good. It is that at some point, he believes that he is no good and stops trying to escape the gravity of that condemnation, a sentence that his father probably delivered.
A lot of directors love to make period pieces, but the movies feel staged, and the actors feel too modern whereas “Nightmare Alley” feels as if del Toro went back in time and shot the movie. The entire cast look like themselves instead of doing an impression of an actor from that era and embody the physicality of that time. I felt as if Cooper stepped out of a John Steinbeck novel and just when I felt as if I could nail who he looked like (shades of Clark Gable, but also thicker like Cary Grant), he would morph again. Just like Stan keeps sober to remain nimble and peg his marks, Cooper uses his face and body to shift from scene to scene to keep us guessing about his character until the end. All the women actors play facets of the protagonist’s personality though they also stand as their own characters independent from him. Toni Collette as Zeena is Stan as a man torn between loyalty and impulse towards desire. Rooney Mara as Molly Cahill is his better self, still a scammer, but with a moral code, and Dr. Ritter is the opposite. They are only separated because of their different histories—Molly was relatively loved and protected whereas Dr. Ritter, though seemingly well off, suffered more.
I was thrilled to see Supernatural’s Jim Beaver as a sheriff with an ax to grind. Tim Blake Nelson proposing that anyone other than himself play the geek is rich. Shout to Troy James whom I would recognize anywhere as The Snake Man, but whom most audiences may know as Gabriel in “Malignant” (2021) and metahuman villain Rag Doll in “The Flash.” I may not have his name memorized, but his talent is unforgettable. Shout out to Holt McCallany who never gets to tell his character’s backstory. I want to know why his character was so loyal.
The real terror of “Nightmare Alley” is the con that is couched as society and normal with no sense of guilt over its sins and no desire to be punished, but to punish others for their sins. Why is the judge friends with such a man? What kind of society encourages their sons and loved ones to run to death? If sons are considered monsters for patricide, then what about fathers who kill their sons? Considering how many monstrous fathers del Toro explicitly exposes, the context alleviates the brutal image of the protagonist as murderer.
