4.5 stars out of 5
During pandemic days, or shall I say nights, I’ve really upped my watching of Eddie Muller’s Noir Alley offerings on TCM. One film I haven’t caught — or didn’t even known about till today — is 1947’s Nightmare Alley. Which is probably for the best, as I strolled into 2021’s Nightmare Alley remake without any preconceptions beyond my fandom for Guillermo del Toro.
Del Toro gets to indulge a clear love of noir — the lighting, camera angles, heavy music, etc. — while combining it with his established fondness for freaks, this time in a carnival setting. At the beginning I worried that the whole “backstage at the old-timey carnival/circus freak show” thing was cinematically played out, featured in recent years in everything from Tim Burton’s Dumbo to American Horror Story. But a storyteller as gifted as del Toro can make an old concept (not to mention an old movie) his own, especially with an A-list cast. Bradley Cooper leads the way as a mysterious but game drifter willing to work his way up in Willem Dafoe’s (occasionally) traveling show. Cooper initially seems good-natured and eager to learn the tricks of the trade. But this is noir, so we soon learn that he’s greedy and looking for shortcuts to the big time as a mentalist. It’s a good role for Cooper: being the mid-American nice guy is something he can do in his sleep, but he gets to sink his teeth into the darker core of this character.
Dafoe has the perfect face and voice for the mostly on-the-level but “come on kid this is carnival life” boss. Also around the tents we have subdued, innocent Rooney Mara, kind-faced veteran mentalist Toni Collette and her booze-slowed partner David Strathairn, and strongman Ron Perlman. Once Cooper convinces Mara to run off to the bright lights of the big city for their own two-person act, we meet femme fatale Cate Blanchett, smiling socialite Mary Steenburgen, the always great and initially unrecognizable Richard Jenkins as a man of wealth and taste, and my boy Holt McCallany (Mindhunter, Lights Out) as Jenkins’ muscle.
As the drama revs up, so does del Toro’s bravura filmmaking, and Nightmare Alley is a thrilling, beautifully-constructed neo noir.
Jack Silbert, curator