A remake of Edmund Goulding’s searing 1947 film Nightmare Alley might have been a good fit for the Guillermo del Toro who made Cronos and The Devil’s Backbone. In those gritty, poetic films, the director displayed a knack for humanism laced with a casual ruthlessness, and a concern with how trickery and illusion both reflected and intensified personal longing—interests that are pertinent to the story of Nightmare Alley. Over the years, though, del Toro has softened up considerably, developing an addiction to tropes for their own sake and to honeyed, moneyed cinematography that reflects little more than the fastidiousness of its own craftspeople. In the tradition of Crimson Peak and his Oscar-winning The Shape of Water, del Toro’s remake of Nightmare Alley is less a living and breathing movie than a fossilized riff on the idea of a movie, particularly the American noir.
An early stylistic flourish in this remake telegraphs one of its significant and characteristic disappointments. For about 10 minutes, Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper) doesn’t speak, as he evades a tortured past and ingratiates himself with a seedy traveling carnival in the 1940s. This is a suitable entrance for a protagonist, building the audience’s anticipation for the emergence of his personality, that also establishes a pattern of passivity. The Stanton of the Goulding film, played by a brutally unsentimental Tyrone Power, entered the frames fully formed and eager, ready to learn the ropes of the carnival’s telepathy show and willing to jump in the pants of whomever enabled his ascension of the showbiz ladder. By contrast, Cooper’s Stanton is less certain and less sinister. Things just sort of happen to him.
Women, such as the clairvoyant Zeena (Toni Collette), seem to adopt Stanton, and when he abandons them, it’s all well and good. The romantic triangle between Zeena, Stanton, and a younger performer, Molly (Rooney Mara), has been significantly softened for this Nightmare Alley. Throughout the film, del Toro and co-screenwriter Kim Morgan continue to sand down any potential sexual, political edge that the material promises. Even the narcotic pleasure that Power’s Stanton took in grifting “rubes” is almost entirely scrubbed away here.
Given his fascination with show business and gadgets, del Toro stays with the carnival longer than Goulding, conjuring a pastiche of old circus tents and Ferris wheels and performers and oddities. Some of the sights are wonderful, such as the electric chair that Stanton rigs for Molly, and there’s an unnerving glimpse at the jarred fetuses that the carnival’s leader, Clem (Willem Dafoe), shows Stanton. But Dan Laustsen’s cinematography, with its soft, intensely bright colors and storybook compositions, sentimentalizes the carnival even during the film’s bleaker passages, interfering with the actual drama. But one very effective scene stands out during this stretch: of Clem explaining to Stanton how one creates a “geek,” the desperate addict who resembles a monster and bites the heads off chickens for spectators’ amusement.
Stanton eventually learns from Zeena a code that allows him to feign telepathy and he and Molly become a star attraction in the city, trading the sharks of the carnival for more moneyed wolves. At this point, del Toro’s Nightmare Alley, like the original film, transitions from a picaresque into a full-blown noir, as Stanton circles Lilith Ritter (Cate Blanchett), a psychologist who immediately sees through his act, in which he describes objects, while blindfolded, that Molly holds up to him from among the audience. Lilith records the confessions of her rich patients in secret, and is willing to conspire with Stanton to fleece them, thusly devolving his profession into direct, literal con artistry. Of course, Lilith is revealed to be more ingenious, powerful, and cold-blooded than Stanton himself.
That’s the idea anyway, though this Stanton has never seemed all that cold-blooded to begin with and Lilith is so over the top that your guard may well be up the instant she enters the frame. The Lilith of Goulding’s film gradually took over the narrative—a sleek, subtly masculinized dark angel hiding in plain sight. Blanchett’s Lilith, though, is the second coming of Gene Tierney and Veronica Lake, with a streak of Barbara Stanwyck’s embittered self-sufficiency. Blanchett, dressed to the nines, is commanding, with a menacingly, erotically urbane voice that seems to emanate less from her trim body than from the walls surrounding her. In corporeal form, her Lilith is the intersection of sex and money that so obsesses America, and Blanchett damn near transcends the retro obviousness of the role through sheer force of will. She also manages to perk Cooper up, as del Toro’s film occasionally offers the simple pleasure, fading from contemporary cinema, of watching sensationally hot icons of the screen flirt and circle one another, while considering the prospect of fucking.
Viewers unacquainted with William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 novel may find the criminal conspiracy that drives the final third of Nightmare Alley both random and cheesy, with no real through line, while fans of the original film will be able to diagnose the problem: that del Toro is afraid of the through line. In Goulding’s film, Stanton wants to con enough money to finance a church, which he sees as the highest station of his flim-flam routine. Which is to say that the original drew a pitiless line of equivocation between carny acts and mentalist shows, psychology, and religion, implying that all are forms of telling us what we want to hear, differing primarily in terms of prestige. Stanton tempts the fates, and perhaps God strikes back. But this Nightmare Alley is just a story of a woman screwing a man over out of boredom, a pastiche of a pastiche of a pastiche, with a few unconvincing acts of violence for spice.
Del toro and Morgan do substitute the blasphemy angle with a new fixation on alcoholism. Both films suggest that Stanton is destined to become the geek, and in this case it’s because teetotal Stanton is preordained to succumb to his family disease. This conceit is potentially resonant, particularly given Cooper’s own struggles, but he took us much deeper into addiction in his own A Star Is Born. Shearing Stanton of his visceral drive leaves Cooper adrift, playing the straight man to bigger performances, and serving, most especially, as an avatar for the audience to navigate del Toro’s gallery of cinematic fetishes. Modern filmmakers continue to misunderstand vintage noirs, which were connected intimately to their own time and setting, with few pretentious frills. That’s the source of their continued pleasure. Del Toro, though, reimagines an agonizing, still shocking noir as an exhibit in a wax museum.
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