Butler's Cinema Scene

“NIGHTMARE ALLEY” My rating: C+(In theaters)

150 minutes | MPAA rating: R

That Guillermo del Toro is one of our great film craftsmen isn’t in question.

An astonishing degree of attention has been lavished on every image in his “Nightmare Alley”; expect Oscar nominations in virtually all the technical categories: effects, cinematography, costuming, production design.

That said, the film as drama left me…well, indifferent.  

Adapted by del Toro and Kim Morgan from William Lindsay’s novel, this is really two movies.

In the first drifter Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper) hobos around the Depression-era U.S. We’ve seen Stanton set fire to a house in which he has placed a body…it’s probable that he’s on the run from the law.

On the verge of starvation, Stanton gets a gig doing manual labor for the operator (William Dafoe) of a sleazy traveling carnival, the kind of shady operation that is always a step ahead of the local moralists and the cops.  (One of their disreputable attractions is “the Geek,” a hairy animalistic wraith who lives in darkness, emerging only to bite the heads off live chickens for the entertainment of the rubes).

For the newcomer the eerie carnival (think “Something Wicked This Way Comes”) offers not only shelter and a paycheck, but a chance to learn a new trade.  Stanton shacks up with Zeena the Seer (Toni Collette), learning the tricks of her fake mind-reading act. 

Meanwhile he is drawn to Molly (Rooney Mara), the young beauty who allows herself to be strapped into an electric chair and zapped with thousands of lightning bolts.

The second half of “Nightmare Alley” takes place a couple of years later.  Stanton and Molly have fled the carnival and established themselves as a top mentalist act, performing in posh nightclubs.  Stanton has transformed himself from ragged drifter to swank sophisticate.

But he’s still a crook at heart, and with the help of a high society shrink (Cate Blanchett) he plans his biggest grift, taking on an impossibly rich captain of industry (Richard Jenkins) who is tormented by his evil past and seeks some sort of metaphysical forgiveness.

Stanton is supremely confidant, but one suspects he is biting off way more than he can chew.

Lindsay’s novel, published in 1946 (and filmed the next year with Tyrone Power in the lead), is a classic noir effort that has been described as “a portrait of the human condition…a creepy, all-too-harrowing masterpiece.”

The main problem with the movie, I think, is that over the last 70-plus years film, television and literature have borrowed shamelessly from Lindsay’s opus.  His ideas have been recirculated with such regularity that del Toro’s film struggles beneath a smothering blanket of been-there-seen-that.

The problem is magnified by the film’s languid running time (2 and 1/2 hours) and the fact that despite the first-rate cast (I haven’t even mentioned Ron Perlman, David Strathairn, Mary Steenburgen, Clifton Collins Jr., Tim Blake Nelson and Holt McCallany), I found the film emotionally remote. The viewer is left on the outside looking in.

And still…del Toro masterfully creates an overwhelming aura of corruption and exploitation. 

We’ll have to be satisfied with that.

| Robert W. Butler