by Miguel E. Rodriguez
Director: Guillermo del Toro
Cast: Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, Toni Collette, Willem Dafoe, Rooney Mara, David Strathairn
My Rating: 6/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 80% Certified Fresh
PLOT: An ambitious carny with a talent for manipulating people with a few well-chosen words hooks up with a female psychiatrist who is even more dangerous than he is.
No good movie is too long; no bad movie is short enough. – Roger Ebert
Nightmare Alley is director Guillermo del Toro’s longest film to date at exactly two-and-a-half hours. Going by Ebert’s dictum above, I have to say that it was too long by maybe a half hour or more, but that doesn’t make it a “bad” film. Just a poorly edited one.
The story revolves around a Depression-era drifter with a troubled past who becomes a carny with the kind of flea-bitten traveling circus that tours all the urban hotspots of Iowa and Kansas, and which is almost all sideshows: a psychic (Toni Collette), a giant (played by del Toro regular Ron Perlman), a rubber man, a girl impervious to electrical currents (Rooney Mara), and a geek show, among other things. What’s a geek show, you ask? Why, that’s where people pay two bits to watch a man bite the head off a live chicken. We are shown one such performance in the opening minutes of the film. It’s hard for me to believe people were entertained by this, no matter how long ago it was. I mean, the geek did not look like he was having much fun…although he did seem to be having more fun than the chicken.
Anyway, to make a long story short, the carny, named Stanton (Bradley Cooper), befriends the psychic and her husband (David Strathairn) and reveals that he has always been a student of human behavior, and with a few quick observations, he can make factual statements about someone that boggle the mind. One thing leads to another, and eventually he leaves the carny behind, with the electrical-current girl, Molly, in tow. Soon he is headlining nightclubs and posh bars with his mind-reading act, with Molly as his assistant. One night a beautiful psychiatrist with a level-headed gaze (Cate Blanchett) sees one of his performances and suggests a con: she will provide detailed information about her rich and powerful patients on the sly, and he will do command performances for these elites, making them both rich. What happens next, I leave for you to discover.
(I must be honest: this is not the kind of film I was expecting from del Toro. A character study of tragic greed and hubris? Where are the monsters? The supernatural nightmares of the title? But I’m always telling people to criticize the movie the filmmakers made, and not the movie you wish they had made. I press on.)
I’m finding it hard to summarize my thoughts here. The movie looked great. I mean, it looked amazing. At one point, Stanton runs into the carnival’s funhouse looking for someone, and it’s filled with the kind of over-the-top prop demons and fake ghosts that made me hope we would get a later sequence where these things came alive in some horrifying way. But no, it’s just intended as throwaway scenery, glimpsed once and never seen again.
There is an extended sequence where Stanton tries to revamp Molly’s act as the “Electric Girl”, coming up with new costumes, new props, new patter (patter is important with sideshows), and it’s a relatively lengthy sequence which felt like it was setting something up. And, yeah, there’s kind of a payoff, but not the kind I felt it was building towards.
The movie left me with a vague sense of frustration throughout. We are fed gobs of information about the tricks used by sideshow psychics, the sad ploy used to hire the geeks, the psychic’s husband looms large in the story and then abruptly becomes a non-factor, and it just went on and on and on. Then in the “riches” part of the rags-to-riches story, Stanton has become insufferable, a believer of his own press releases, willing to put his livelihood (and his life) in jeopardy for that one last big job.
This is all very intriguing stuff, on paper. But as executed and written, there seemed to be unnecessarily long scenes with loads of information being dumped on us with nothing moving the action forward. I would pay money to watch Cate Blanchett read a Denny’s menu, but even her extended “therapy” sessions with Bradley Cooper felt interminable. I felt like those random crowds in Monty Python and the Holy Grail periodically yelling, “GET ON WITH IT!”
To be fair, the Stanton character does eventually get his comeuppance, in literally the final ten minutes of the film. Full disclosure, I will say without spoilers that it is very gratifying, it had me and some random dude behind me exclaiming loudly in the movie theater, and it features some of the best acting Bradley Cooper has ever done. But…it came long after I had started shifting in my seat and wondering if I would miss anything important if I ran to get some more candy.
I give Nightmare Alley a 6 out of 10, mainly because it looks so damn good. del Toro has yet to make a movie that doesn’t look masterful (yes, even Blade II is a beauty to behold). Also, the acting all around is top notch. There’s talk Cooper may get an Oscar nod, which wouldn’t surprise me. But it boils down to a very, VERY long drive for an all-too-short day at Denouement Beach. A ninety-minute movie crammed into 150 minutes. Alas.
2 UNPAID MOVIE CRITICS!!!! 