Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley Is the Noir Equivalent of a Fake

But if there’s any affinity for seediness to director Guillermo del Toro, it doesn’t come through on screen. The film’s bursts of violence are genuinely bracing — a face bashed in, a skull shattered, and the signature act of animal mutilation performed by a carnival geek, a figure of abject degradation who haunts the film’s ill-fated protagonist. But for a pulpy tale of addiction and desperate lives on the fringes, Nightmare Alley is otherwise depressingly short on actual darkness and discomfort. It doesn’t soft-pedal its material so much as it suffocates it with the meticulousness of its choices, with every aspect of its squalor noticeably art-directed. It’s the film equivalent of a fake dive bar where the dingy interiors are painstakingly designed, the drinks cost 15 bucks, and the vintage cigarette machine in the back dispenses miniature birds by some local artist instead of smokes. Nightmare Alley is based on a 1946 novel by William Lindsay Gresham which has been brought to screen once before, in 1947, in a black-and-white film starring Tyrone Power, a matinee idol who wanted to prove he could tackle more challenging material. This new take on the book stars Bradley Cooper, who has nothing he needs to prove, but who doesn’t seem to be the actor the movie actually wants in the role of Stan Carlisle, a man who wanders his way into work on a sideshow. The screenplay, which del Toro wrote with his wife, the critic turned screenwriter Kim Morgan, insists on Stan’s callow youth, with characters repeatedly referring to the 46-year-old as “kid” and “young buck.” It’s been a year with some notable age-related casting choices — from Ben Platt’s disastrous reprisal of his Broadway role in Dear Evan Hansen to Sandra Bullock’s heroic decision to not just play the older sister of a 25-year-old in The Unforgivable, but to also appear as the character in flashbacks set 20 years earlier. The discordance in Nightmare Alley is striking mostly because it’s so unnecessary, present only because the movie seems worried about gaps between its present and the repeated flashes back to Stan dragging a body through a house he then sets on fire. But Stan is someone who pretends to be historyless even as everything he does is due to his past — something that would hold true no matter how old he is. Stan finds a place for himself as a barker for and sometimes lover to Zeena (Toni Collette), a psychic who, despite her weakness for handsome faces, is devoted to her alcoholic husband Pete (David Strathairn), with whom she used to perform in much glitzier venues. In their heyday, they did a mentalism routine in which Pete, blindfolded on stage, would identify objects offered up to Zeena by members of the audience. In between romancing the sylphlike Molly (Rooney Mara), Stan angles to learn the codes that Pete created to enable Zeena to cue him as to what she was holding. All data is taken from the source: http://vulture.com Article Link: https://www.vulture.com/article/movie... #NightmareAlley #newsfox #newstoday #newstodayusa #newstodayoncnn #newstodayworld #