Rating: R
Runtime: 2 hours, 30 minutes
Director: Guillermo del Toro
Quick Impressions:
I could not have loved this movie more. I liked it far more than I expected. I loved every minute, and it’s currently tied with the new West Side Story for the 2021 movie I’m most excited about. (West Side Story is going to be hard to top because we listen to the songs in the car now, and I can’t stop thinking about the gut-punch tragedy of this new Anita’s final lines in the candy store! And Rita Moreno! Remembering that scene gives me all the feelings!) But watching Nightmare Alley gave me intense pleasure, too. The plot elements play to every one of my interests to an almost ridiculous degree. From my point of view, it just kept getting better and better and better! (I felt like Mr. Burns in that episode of The Simpsons where they put on a play (about his death) to convince him to give money to the school, and he says, “This play really speaks to me.” Except I’m pretty sure Guillermo del Toro did not create Nightmare Alley just for me. It’s based on 1946 novel by William Lindsay Gresham. (Even though I was unfamiliar with Nightmare Alley, I just realized that Gresham wrote a book about Houdini that I used to love back when I was obsessed with Houdini as a teenager!) (And Gresham’s wife is the Debra Winger character from Shadowlands! My mom used to watch that movie every day during the same period when I was reading the Houdini book!))
Never-ending tangents aside, when we bought our tickets, I was more excited to see an advanced screening than I was about the movie itself. Then I forgot we were seeing Nightmare Alley two days before it opens. Before the film, I did a double-take when Nightmare Alley’s own trailer began to play. That left me bemused until a few minutes later when Guillermo del Toro popped up to tell us how lucky we were to be seeing the film early. “Oh yeah!” I realized and said to my husband, “That explains it! This preview package doesn’t actually go with this movie!”
Only a handful of people were watching the film with us (in a vast auditorium) which turned out to be fortunate because this movie struck a chord with me, and I could not stop talking!
“That’s going to be him,” I whispered excitedly to my husband. “You realize that, right? This has to be foreshadowing! He’s literally telling us the ending of the movie right now!”
Then later, I whispered, “Oh my God! She’s playing this part as Lauren Bacall!” And later, I blurted out (in a whisper), “Look, it’s a vagina! You see it, right? With the ovaries? Hear how she’s Lauren Bacall? The way she said that line? See how she’s doing the Look?”
And that vagina got my husband all excited later, too, when Bradley Cooper did something to it, so it wasn’t just me. My husband did some whispering of his own.
I, however, was the only person anticipatorily ringing my own neck with a theatrical, lolling tongue. (I did this not once, but twice. But I was discreet about it.) (It was dark. We were in the back. And no one was sitting anywhere near us.) (If they had been, they probably would have moved.)
I did manage to contain myself sometimes. You have no idea how much I wanted to say, “Bradley Cooper is taking a bath now? He stole that idea from Lady Gaga!” But that would have distracted my husband during a dialogue heavy moment, so I kept that pointless joke to myself.
The Good:
Nightmare Alley plays to practically every single one of my interests. Carnivals thrill me. (My mother never let me go to them because she said they were too dangerous.) (And I believed her because I had watched Something Wicked This Way Comes.)
I’ve always been captivated by the romantic idea of running away to join the circus or the carnival. When I was in college, I once tried to convince my friends to go to the circus. Someone didn’t see what fun that would be. What would we do? So I said, “We’ll…be in the circus.” (After that, when I would get a faraway expression or a crazy idea, my best friend would always take one look at me and say, “Let’s go to the circus and be in the circus!”)
If you love carnivals, you’ll be swept away with joy by the first third of this movie. Nobody does atmosphere like Guillermo del Toro! Watching this, you’ll feel like you’ve been to a carnival yourself, like you’ve lived there and breathed in the air for thirty years.
I adore carnival atmosphere, so full of dramatic possibilities! An abandoned amusement park plays a prominent role in the first book of my own series, Limitless Night. (It’s not exactly an abandoned amusement park. The land is just enchanted to look that way to outsiders, but you don’t find that out until book three.) A Ferris wheel and a carousel improve any cinematic landscape, and don’t get me started on colorful tents and exotic costumes.
Secretly, I have always wanted to be a fortune teller at a carnival. (Maybe not so secretly. Fortune teller is my go-to costume for Halloween parties/circus-themed weddings/book reports.) I would love to tell people’s fortunes, to do an act pretending to be a psychic or a medium. I’ve also always longed to be a mentalist. (I never seem to find time to apply myself to this very seriously, unfortunately, although I did get reasonably far with a trick deck of cards when I was a teenager. I’m not bad at reading people’s faces; I’m terrible at manipulating the cards. If I were more dexterous, surely I’d be a street magician by now.) (This was all back during my Houdini phase. It didn’t take me long to discover that I would never be an escape artist. And trying to control my heartbeat through willpower just gave me a headache.) But in my fantasies, I am well on my way to becoming a fortune telling mentalist.
So you can imagine how thrilled I was when the protagonist of this film immediately hooks up with a fortune teller and then starts training to become a mentalist. I kept turning to my husband and making faces of excited delight.
The cast in this movie is also pretty thrilling. Going in, I did not realize just how many great actors are in Nightmare Alley. I didn’t know Toni Colette was in the movie. (She’s the fortune teller.) I didn’t know David Strathairn was in it, either! (He’s the mentalist.) Also hanging around the carnival are Ron Perlman, Willem Dafoe, and Rooney Mara. (“Good thing she’s always wearing a bright red coat!” is another thing I whispered to my husband later on.)
The story starts slowly, but that lets us soak in all the atmosphere. (This movie could so easily win a bunch of awards for things like production design, costuming, make-up, anything visual. I liked Dan Lausten’s cinematography as much as Dune’s honestly. I’m a big fan of the shot composition in this movie.)
Then about a third of the way through, the movie turns into a film noir. I mean it starts as a film noir, but a third of the way through, we ditch the carnival setting entirely for the big city where we meet Cate Blanchett who is clearly channeling Lauren Bacall. I love Lauren Bacall. When she was alive, I used to Google her name every day to see if she had given any new interviews I could read or watch. (She gives the best interviews! You can learn so much from listening to her, and she’s always so engaging! I love her books, too!)
My grandma was notoriously picky about movie stars. There was a long (and often baffling) list of female stars she couldn’t stand and wouldn’t tolerate. Fortunately, we both liked Lauren Bacall, so we watched a lot of Bacall/Bogart movies together. (Well, we watched the four films they made together a lot of times.) Then when my husband met me, he discovered he loved Humphrey Bogart, and he’s especially fond of To Have and Have Not. Grandma and I loved The Big Sleep (which I also regularly used in class as part of a figurative language lesson), so I’ve watched that countless times. (I also like Key Largo and Dark Passage. When I first started watching film noir, I preferred Bogart and Bacall’s films to all others in the genre because usually—even when she’s a bit shifty—she ends up being in love with him and being on his side. My mom preferred The Maltese Falcon, and that stressed me out so much as a child!)
At any rate, Blanchett is definitely playing this role as if she were Lauren Bacall in a 40s film noir playing the role. I haven’t seen the 1947 Nightmare Alley with Helen Walker in the Dr. Ritter role, but I’ve seen enough 1940s Movie Lauren Bacall to know that Blanchett is acting like her. She copies her mannerisms, body movements, vocal inflections, head tilts. I love Cate Blanchett and Lauren Bacall (and scheming movie psychologists who get you on the couch and push you past your limits!) (That’s another thing I once wanted to be, a psychologist.)
Richard Jenkins also shows up late in the film. He plays a man named Ezra Grindle, which is the coolest name (except for Rooney Mara). (“Remember, he got an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor for The Shape of Water,” I whispered to my husband. Later, I added, also in a whisper, “I mentioned that because Guillermo del Toro directed that, too.”) I find his character deeply fascinating and revolting. I wouldn’t be surprised if Jenkins gets a Best Supporting Actor nomination for this film, too. (There’s a lot of competition, but you never know.)
If it were me handing out awards, I’d also nominate Willem Dafoe. (And Cate Blanchett as long as it’s up to me!) (Maybe Toni Collette, too! She’s probably not in the movie enough to justify it, but why not if it’s up to me?)
Even Mary Steenburgen is in this movie! And she managed to surprise me! (It’s not what she does. It’s how she does it.)
Most Oscar-Worthy Moment, Willem Dafoe:
Dafoe character takes Cooper’s character out for a meal and tells him the most captivating, unnerving story. (It appalled me as a human but delighted me as an English major.) Dafoe’s part is relatively small, but for this scene alone, he would be a deserving winner of Best Supporting Actor (though I doubt that will happen).
Take that with a grain of salt, though, because at our house, we love Willem Dafoe. Even my six-year-old is fond of going on mock impassioned tirades, pretending to curse us, and then telling us, “I’m Willem Dafoe!” or “I’m the guy from The Lighthouse.” (Note: He hasn’t seen The Lighthouse. It’s just that my daughter does this so often that he’s picked it up from her because he likes to be in on the joke.)
Best Scene Visually:
Even though the carnival is the most visually rich portion of the film, there are some amazing scenes later on, too. Dr. Ritter’s office is something else! I love all of Cooper and Blanchett’s scenes together in there. (The first time he visits her office may be my favorite scene in the movie. I can’t decide.)
I also couldn’t resist remarking on the visual echoes between a scene with a lie-detector and an earlier scene with an electric chair. (This movie is full of visual echoes. It’s not just detail rich. What we see has meaning. You could probably watch it a hundred times with the sound down and notice something new every time.)
Best Action Sequence:
You think to yourself, “Why does he possibly imagine this will turn out well?” And it sure doesn’t. It turns out about as you would expect, which is badly. (I won’t say what “it” is to avoid spoilers. But the last part of this film is action heavy for a little while. And Richard Jenkins gets this line that is weirdly chilling. What I don’t quite understand is why Bradley Cooper seems so surprised.)
Also quite good is Zeena’s first show (that we see).
Best Scene:
Honestly any actor in this could get a surprise Oscar nomination. Everyone in the supporting cast has some great moments. (Toni Collette’s last tarot reading is very engaging and fun to watch and predict. One of the delightful things about Nightmare Alley is that it repeatedly sets things up for us to predict. It has a real sense of showmanship.)
I’ve already singled out Dafoe for praise. I also like David Stratharin. He gets some fantastic lines and certainly makes the most of them. There are two scenes featuring serious conversations between Cooper’s character and David Strathairn. Collectively, they’re the best scene.
Random Book Recommendation:
I’ve never read Nightmare Alley, but this film kept reminding me of a children’s picture book by Kate DiCamillo about a chicken named Louise who suffers from ennui, leaves her humdrum life in the coop to have an exciting adventure, then tires of that and returns to the coop to regale the other chickens with the story. (This happens three times in a row. One time, she joins the circus. The book is brilliant because it never explains how she gets to any of these new locations. It just says, “So she joined the circus.” And when she tells the other chickens her story, they always gasp, “Heavens, Louise!”) Nightmare Alley made me think of this book so many times that I’ll probably buy it for my son for Christmas! (My daughter and I always used to check it out of the library.)
The Negatives:
I would have been upset had this movie ended in any other way, but I still found the ending hard to like. (I eagerly anticipated it through the entire movie, but I was only eager because I anticipated it. The reality of it is just so sad.)
I also find the protagonist really, really (really, really) unlikeable. He has so many chances to make me like him, and I do pity him. But just when I would start to empathize, he’d do something to remind me of why I didn’t like him in the first place.
I’m with him so far and no further. I think excitedly, “Ooh! I want to join a carnival! I want to be a fortune teller! I want to learn mentalism.”
And then Bradley Cooper’s character is like, “And we’ll use these fun things to deceive people, steal from them, and hurt them.” And that’s where he loses me.
I want to pretend to be a fortune teller, use mentalism to keep a crowd spellbound, pretend to summon a ghost. And then I want the ghost to appear for real Patrick-Swayze style, and we all have a fun adventure together. (I also love ghosts.)
This movie doesn’t make scamming people as a phony medium (or going on dangerous car rides) look as fun as Family Plot.
I understand that Cooper’s character is suffering, so I’m sympathetic. And I want to like him, but ultimately, I don’t. (Of course, he doesn’t like himself either.) (I do love the idea that he’s told repeatedly not to start to believe the mentalism. But he believes it. And then he allows the carnival to predict the course of his whole life. From a literary perspective, the story is cool, but it’s awfully sad.) I feel like there must be a way to dress up as a fortune teller and put on a show, and yet not end up with the brutal violence we get at the end of this film.
The other thing I don’t understand is why Cooper’s character loves Molly (Rooney Mara), or why, for that matter, she loves him. I don’t get their relationship at all (except it reminds me a bit of that chicken Louise. “We’ll run off to see the world…and then we’ll get tired of it.”)
To me, that romance comes out of left field. (I suppose it is in keeping with his character and that she’s young and inexperienced.) I’ll have to watch the film a second time before I make up my mind about this completely. (I kept wanting to say, “Are you sure you don’t want to stay with Zeena? Have you noticed that she’s a fortune teller, and that she’s Toni Collette?” She seems more fun. And I think Molly only likes him because he lets her take risks.
The movie left me with some unanswered questions, too. I can answer them myself easily enough, but I want to know more about Richard Jenkins and more about Cate Blanchett. (And I wish we got to see more of Willem Dafoe.)
Also, my husband and I had a disagreement of interpretation which we discussed on the way home.
“A mistake is not the same as an accident,” I said. “It would be a mistake to cheat on your wife but not an accident. Let me repeat, it would be a mistake to cheat on your wife. Accidents can happen.”
Overall:
My husband is still thinking about how he would rank Nightmare Alley compared to his favorite film of the year Don’t Look Up. It’s no contest for me. I liked it much more than Don’t Look Up (though that is a good film, too). Guillermo del Toro has such a gift for creating visually rich worlds, cultivating atmosphere. I wish he could come over and finish decorating my house for Christmas. When he finishes, we can watch Nightmare Alley together. I’m sure I’d enjoy that.