Nightmare Alley 2021

As is expected from Guillermo del Toro, this is an interesting one. The universal positive here is the acting. Bradley Cooper and Rooney Mara are both excellent, as is the entire ensemble, with Toni Collette, Willem Dafoe, and David Strathairn being the standouts. Cate Blanchett was perhaps the only one who I was less on board with, but I think that has more to do with the writing than with her performance.

As far as the story goes, this film is divided into two very distinct segments: (1) Stan's life with the carnival; and (2) Stan's life with Molly in the city. For me this structure resulted in what felt like a pacing issue. After moving very quickly through the first segment, with numerous time jumps keeping things progressing, things seemed to slow down in the second segment. This might have to do with the fact that the story narrows significantly. The opening segment was more slice of life; establishing the setting, the characters, and their relationships. Character driven rather than plot driven. The second segment flips this around and becomes very plot focused. I can't help but compare the two segments and unfortunately the second doesn't quite deliver on the promise of the first. Character reversals and reveals felt rushed or unearned (e.g. Cate Blanchett's final scene in particular felt very contrived) and the main conflict itself felt somewhat half baked. At the heart of the story is also the phony mentalism, which started to wear thin for me, as it doesn't exactly make for exciting cinematic material and starts to strain my suspension of disbelief. Luckily, even some of these questionable elements are largely saved by the fact that everything else about the film is so damn good, including not only the aforementioned acting, but also the stellar costumes, set design, directing, dialogue, and pretty much everything else that goes into filmmaking. And beyond that, the movie is also able to steer itself into an appropriately nightmarish ending, tying back to all of the great groundwork from the opening section. I found it quite appropriate that Willem Dafoe's tremendous monologue about recruiting geeks would be the critical building block of the final scene. Plus Tim Blake Nelson does an excellent job in his brief cameo executing the devilish plan Dafoe outlined.

As an aside, soon after finishing this film I learned that it was a remake of an apparently well reviewed 1947 film, which was in turn based on a 1946 novel. While I'm not normally one to watch two versions of the same story back to back, in this case I'm tempted to watch the original, as I'd be interested to see how this story was told back when it was more contemporary (the story takes place from the 1930s-1940s). The period piece elements of this film are so intentional and well realized that I can't help but wonder if the original would feel a bit bland in comparison, as the setting/era might be less of a focus.

This is great! I loved it!

'Nightmare Alley' is a superb watch! I particularly enjoyed the beginning and end, which are truly excellent; the middle part isn't as strong, but is still top notch in its own right. I love the dark atmosphere it sets from the get-go, the sound design is outstanding - some bits are so striking and I love it! It has a quality, engrossing story to boot.

Bradley Cooper leads the cast with quality, though he isn't even the sole standout of the film. He is joined by a whole host of terrific performers: Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Toni Collette, Willem Dafoe, Richard Jenkins, David Strathairn ... I could go on, simply phenomenal casting! I wanted more of them all, and yet felt I got the perfect amount too.

The 150 minute run time went by incredibly quickly for me; if I hadn't known it was on for that long, I would never have guessed its length to be anywhere near that. It's a slow burn, but a slow burn done tremendously. Guillermo del Toro - this is the first film of his I've seen - & Co. did a super job, I have no complaints at all. I was toying for ages between a 9 or a 10 rating, it just about creeps its way into the latter.

Just brilliant. Go watch!

A milestone in the filmography of Del Toro: after 10 films in which the protagonist with monstrous appearances must survive in a world that misunderstood it with his identity, in this 11th a Bradley Cooper in a state of grace interprets the monster which, refusing radically his identity, hides it to himself and to others, to whom he present himself only behind the mask he wants to resemble at any cost. A monster that denies everything he cannot admit to be, self-destructing himself at the end of a long parable of lies with which he deluded himself to be able of grant access to high society before falling ruinously in the abyss of the 'nightmare alley' which entitles the movie.

So an important variation for del Toro's works, from a series of characters with whom you can empathize to one from which you have to dissociate. To complete it, it was inevitable for him to change all the rest of his narrative formula, moving from the fairytale atmospheres of the Gothic Fantasy to which he has accustomed us in these 30 years towards the noir genre, of which he exploits its indispensable ingredients, cruel cynicism and attraction for self-destruction, to build disenchanted characters with a turbid past they have to conceal for survive in a world more ruthless than themself, pretending to be better than the misery they are forced to live in. Given the themes del Toro usually deals with - precisely the human being as more monstrous than monsters and the power of authoritarian institutions as a harmful force of society that suppresses the creative anarchy of the individual - is almost strange that this foray into noir did not happen early. The simplest explanation is the (bitter) ascertainment that noir is a genre that have been disappeared for decades from theaters, relegated to other media such as TV, with its countless police series, and comics (Batman beign a remarkable pop example). This spoils the phenomenon not as a cultural removal: also in the cinema media, noir's canon survived contaminating other genres, in particular science-fiction, and have been reloaded in post-modern forms, of which the Tarantinian is one of the most radical. However, there is no doubt that among all the narrative formulas invented by the Golden Age Hollywood, noir is the most obsolete today, for its unacceptable stereotypes for contemporary sensitivity, either for its witty and hermetic dialogues and for the extremely slow pacing that the public misunderstands too often for boredom. Perhaps it is the imaginary from which it was inspired by that is no longer part of us, with its metropolis livable only during the day, the rampant crime, the corruption of the institutions ... or maybe it is us who have given up on questioning our morality observing the choices of an aberrant man, forced into a world that resembles him where dog eats dog, and scandalized we preferred to opt for less anxious and disturbing visions of reality.

All reflections that also explain the flop of this film at the box office despite the cast of recall. Regardless of this, it's undoubtful that Del Toro is a true artist, who takes care not too much of its work's commercial success, and that in this case was able to take advantage of an unprecedented contractual power with the producers thanks to the Oscar won for his previous The Shape of Water, thus being able to pack an indigestible to the public film from its premises but in a way that is exactly how he wanted it and as he probably had never been granted before (confirming the Oscars as useful prizes for productions' marketing rather than an artistic certification of the true value of what they reward, The Shape of Water being an happy sporadic exceptions). The hope is that the same creative freedom would also be granted to him in his next film, Pinocchio, a work that he has obsessively chase for 15 years (the fact that it has however been snubbed by all productions except Netflix speaks about the depressing state of the Hollywood industry and does not bode well). Anyway, for the first time del Toro shows us an unprecedented version of his imagination and poetics, getting up all the canons of classic noir - the femme-fatale that is the desire and the ruin of the protagonist, the conflict between elderly powerful men and young vulgar men (vulgar intended as of low-social class or new-comer to the city, because in reality both duelists are horrible kind of people) and the trauma of the past that persecutes, to bear and suffocate with an immoderate use of alcohol and cigarettes. From the excellent historical reconstruction to the highly symbolic and anticipatory scenography for the plot, to the dilated times that give a Golden Age Hollywood mood (in fact the film was also released in a black and white version), to the screenplay made of silences (which in the neo-noir count almost more than the dialogues, just think of the spoken and not-spoken Blade Runner's versions): all the pieces go to the right place to confirm the genuine talent of its author even outside his comfort zone.

In 1939, USA begins to notice the monstrosities in progress in Europe so far greeted with condescending, while the monster Stan is born from a trauma (ir)resolved with sinister revenge and, fleeing from its past, who becomes part of the world of monsters, which in this era is represented as a freak circus: people who live as monsters, in a reality parallel to non-freaks' one consistently to all the films of Del Toro where monsters give access to the fantastic and the metaphysical being its emissar when they interact with ordinary people, in this specific case, during artistic performance for which the bystanders pay so as to escape from their monotonous everyday life. Yet, for the first time in a film by Del Toro, monsters that are not really magical or supernatural creatures, but normal people who pretend to be such and who integrate that role of through with the metaphysical however with respect for their public and disinterested professionalism, which make all the difference between a street artist and a scammer: in del Toro's noir the true magic of fantasy becomes the simulated and tremendously concrete one, which does not produce spells but is content to bring home some money home where barely prepare a dinner at the end of the day. Stan joins this group silently and with distrust so as not to arouse suspicion about his origins but, limiting himself to listening and exploring this world, he is immediately fascinated. Above all he notices an unexpressed, castrated potential, that is the power these freaks have to convince the paying public that the fantastic is indeed a metaphysical world to be accessed and not a light manipulation of perceptions and contexts masterfully orchestrated to capture their interest and to instil their confidence as they slip a quarter of dollar from their hands.

Aided by a smile and a physical presence that in this area count as a natural talent, Stan discovers its vocation in guessing people, so he throws himself into the study of the discipline with the technique learned by Pete, former mentalist who touches the role of new paternal figure for Stan, up to the inevitable consequences. In fact, soon Stan gets frustrated by the moral constraints that Pete and colleagues monsters keep tell him to respect, that is to limit themselves to the mere circus performance avoiding the crossing of the border between artists, safe in a context that protects them, and scammers, indistinguishable from those who live in the world of non-freaks. Limits that keep standing the fragile balance between the two worlds, the monsters excluded from society and consciously confined to a circus that allows them to survive sheltered from the merciless judgment of the non-freaks, who are instead free to visit them to be consciously duped, buying a look over the fantastic. As soon as this balance is questioned, the monopoly of small bourgeois violence comes to make it clear who is subordinate to who, with summary arrests and intimidation. And it is precisely on this occasion that the film changes: Stan exposes himself in defense of the submissive new family he has joined by exploiting what he has learn to make the fearful local sheriff fall in all his trains. A proof that will definitely convince him to have the necessary skills to abandon the nest, because he is not a selfless paladin, but a pathological narcissist.

Unable to accept his nature and the role that the monsters would like to reserve him for his good, Stan is inevitably led to fill his emptiness of identity by compensating for his profound insecurity with a spasmodic desire to achieve everything his ability is able to conquer, escaping from the circus to take the world "and everything it contains", just like the aforementioned Tony Montana of De Palma. The only thing of which Stan is convinced is that he does not want to waste his life like the father he lost and the father he acquired in the circus, both united by resignation due to insecurities who led them to lose the women they loved. By reaction, even towards the women Stan is a conqueror: marked by the trauma of the loss of the mother because of the weakness of the father, as soon as he puts his gaze on a woman he immediately breaks his delay, interpreting the role of a lover for a wise bored wife, of a paternal figure missing for a pure innocent young man, and of sexual fetish for the true femme-fatale of the film. However, burdened by an out-of-measure ego, these are never relationships based on love, because they always foresee some sort of personal gain for him who suppresses his sense of inferiority by acquiring prestige or means to continue his climb of the company, so much so that as soon as they stop being useful to him he immediately abandon them, exactly as done with the freaks' circus. It will be inevitable that when he will feel invincible in front of any interlocutor, believing himself to be the smartest of the two in the conversation, it will be the moment he will step out of the way, underestimating what in the end was just the umpteenth lever to elevate himself, a woman. And it is no coincidence that the character of Cate Blanchette in question, Lilith, is a psychoanalyst who is opposed to a mentalist. During a therapy session, the first question is enough to put in crisis Stan and the performance he leads without interruption 24 hours a day, which he himself candidly admits to lead, proud to be able to boast of it but rather highlighting how ridiculous is his own sense of superiority with which he acts as a great connoisseur of the human mind, in reality clearly kept in hand without effort by a true professional of the matter. Lilith who is in turn a monster, full of rage ready to unleash on those who have hurt her in the past combined with a dramatic solitude, which will make her risk falling in love with Stan while maneuvering him like a pawn to get to his purposes: a true femme-fatale, in some ways similar to the anti-hero of the story, in others his nemesis and antagonist, making the erotic attraction between the two inevitable.

The movie finds its climax in 1941, with the entry into WWII of the USA, when patience is exhausted and the time to oppose monsters can no longer be postponed. Event announced on the radio exactly while in the meantime Stan's castle of lies collapses thunderously, unmasking its true nature in front of the world and its affections: it is del Toro's typical parallelism between the historical context and the story set into it, between the moment in which world's evil became intolerable and that in which Stan's wickedness is unmasked in front of everyone, his illusions break and precipitate him to the margins of society, from which he will no longer be able to emerge again. Lost his chance to do good, he also loses everything that made him human, transforming him into a monster with which it is no longer possible to empathize, a beast.

A film that demonstrates Del Toro's talent in manufacturing scripts as intricate as they are tight and dry, where every moment is essential to oil the mechanism that leads to the obvious finale. Where obvious does not mean trivial, but only that it is the logical consequence of everything seen previously, among other things exposed not too implicitly right from the beginning. In fact, the entire film is symbolically narrated in its initial 15 minutes, when a Stan still looking for self becomes part of the freaks' circus and gets to know what he is destined to become, chasing it while it looks for to escape from the world of monsters. An escape due to his identity refusal and to the belief that he ended up in that place against his own will when instead it is nothing but he himself the architect of his end. 15 minutes in which Stan never speaks until he meets the reflection of himself pronouncing his first lines of the film, that are of compassion while he tries to handle it and with whom he seems to empathize at first sight. However, when it tries to attack him, he immediately explodes in a calculated and controlled violence, almost as if being a routine he is used to, and for this reason appearing ruthless and exposing his inability to elaborate his complex identity, reducing himself to having to silence it by beating it almost to the point of killing. 15 minutes that alone would be enough to tell in advance the entire sense of the film, but in such a well-hidden way that one realizes it only when gets to understand where the ending is going to, and that, by recognizing the very hard sentence to which Stan will be condemned, is lead to an incredible motus of compassion despite all the contempt experienced up to there. A sequence in which the photography reach the peak of the film, enhancing the internal conflict of Stan while he is in a disturbing and expressionist scenography that does not look like it is part of the real world but a dantesque infernal bolt, where he is granted to have an anticipation of the counterpoint that awaits him at the end of his parable, when he will be sentenced to pay for all the unforgivable sins he has committed.

Very skilled in the staging, it disentangles between all the themes it touches (like the conditions of the freaks of the early 1900s), but focusing on enhancing the levers that move the story: the characters, all as credible as the historical reconstruction, used with awereness and dignity. Ultimately, a film calculated in every detail with utmost precision, which travels without digressions towards the powerful finale's moral, making each sequence functional to the story. Certainly one of the best films by Del Toro.

"Man or Beast"
Nightmare Alley is Guillermo del Toro's presentation of a film of intrigues, betrayals and crimes, adding his already characteristic mystical and nightmarish touch. The cinematography of Dan Laustsen, with whom he previously worked on The Shape of Water, is truly marvelous: every frame is perfectly lit, whether in daylight, shadowy interiors, or dim night. The production design by Tamara Deverell and the sets decorated by Shane Vieau are great, the details in each location create the right atmosphere for each moment. Something that was not fully used was the music, since although at times it perfectly complements the scenes, at other times it feels short. The performances of all those involved are good, but nothing outstanding, especially because more than for a film it seemed that they acted for a photograph: each look, each pose, is beautiful. Finally, the main problem for me: the plot is too long, I could easily place it in a novel where you have all the time to develop the characters before the second act, but in the movie it feels very long, and although it is a necessary introduction, there is nothing else that keeps the film attractive outside of the images. The plot is very powerful, and the ironic ending is just what was needed, but as a movie it doesn't quite work. I do recommend it, because it's a good movie, but it's not without flaws.