Guillermo del Toro's 'Nightmare Alley' is one gorgeously bleak bad dream, and gives Bradley Cooper a career-best role as a carny con artist. Read our review.
Perhaps not, though it’s not for want of trying — nor for want of money, stars or, well, anything else, really. If del Toro’s gorgeously appointed film can’t match Goulding’s gritty pulp thriller for pure seediness, that’s because it’s a bit too lavishly constructed and cared-for to conjure a true spirit ofnihilism. But that splendor comes with its own, subtly different rewards.
He’s made for this world, in other words, and rises swiftly through its ranks, shown the ropes and taught some tricks by watchful, weary tarot reader Zeena and her washed-up husband . Buoyed by their mentorship and his attraction to virginal electricity conductor Molly — the white rose in the carnival’s staff of weeds — Stanton comes to believe he has a gift for performative mentalism, an act that can elevate him from the carnival ensemble to solo stardom.
Cut to 1941, where he and Molly are now wowing the wealthy elite of the supper-club circuit in a seemingly perma-frozen Buffalo, New York. The couple’s carny workwear has been traded in for velvet smoking jackets, their caravans for plush Art Deco hotel suites. Their act is all smoke and mirrors, of course, though Stanton is so good at reading people to his advantage to he hardly needs psychic powers.
But its commitment to the collapsing hopelessness of Stanton’s story is impressively short on compromise: managing even the challenging, book-faithful ending that the original film, presumably under studio duress, balked at. That descent is carried by the fearless scumminess of Cooper’s remarkable performance. Always an actor who’s best when tetchily undermining his own alpha swagger — see also— he’s equally impossible to love and look away from.
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