Guillermo del Toro's remake of the 1947 film noir Nightmare Alley is a vast pharaonic edifice, rippling with palm-shaped pillars and interminable marble passageways, a great, cold mausoleum with nothing inside. The film's plot is complicated, involving two acts complete with separate casts of characters, dramatically different settings and milieu and, even, a marked shift in tone -- the first half of the film involves an impoverished carnival and its low-life roustabouts and freaks; the second part of the movie takes place in high society with palatial locations and elaborate 1940's evening gowns and tuxedos. The story is rags to riches to rags again, with a brief bitter postlude. Edmund Goulding, who directed the 1947 picture, required 111 minutes to tell the story and his movie, although briskly paced, flags in places and feels slightly repetitive; del Toro gives his movie an imperial big-budget splendor and the picture clocks in at two and 1/2 hours, that is almost 40 minutes more than the first version. Already too long in its 1947 incarnation, the 2021 version drags, is overly explicit, and tedious -- bigger and longer isn't better, particularly when the story, although ingenious, is nothing more than pulp melodrama.
Del Toro's movie is visually impressive but the heavy, dark decor drags the picture down. Long shots of the wretched little carnival where the story begins invariably feature foreboding clouds and flashes of lightning. Electra, a carny whose schtick is to grasp Tesla coils, and induce bolts of showy static electricity to surge across her shapely body (she has to be part nude, the carny barker says, to keep her garments from electrocuting her), here is bolted into an elaborate, ominous electric chair and the charges of electricity spill over her body is bright, flashing incandescent cascades like the effects in a super-hero movie. Del Toro devises all sorts if symbolic and allegorical imagery: there's a woman whose head appears as an enormous spider in an equally enormous web and a grotesquely deformed fetus, dubbed Enoch, serves as a leit motif, the monster's cyclopean eye glaring at the various grifters and con-artists who populate the film. When the Geek runs amuck in del Toro's extravaganza he conceals himself in a lavish House of Damnation fun-house that is full of spectacular (and expensive-looking) gimmicks another giant eye gazing down from an Argos-eyed wall, a giant hell-mouth with huge machine-driven grinding canines and molars, and acres of shadowy passageways. In Goulding's late-forties film, key plot point are established with lightning rapidity -- wood alcohol gets substituted for drinking booze with the effect that Sheena's old alcoholic partner, a washed-up mentalist, ends up dying; this is set up with a three or four lines and, then, a couple of shots of the old mind-reader expiring in the arms of his wife (who we know to be sleeping with the protagonist, Stan). Del Toro wastes three or four minutes on laying the groundwork for this sequence and telegraphs everything in tedious detail. The climactic scene in which the con-man Stan tries to persuade a vicious oligarch that his long-long girlfriend has been resurrected is unimaginatively set up with dull exchanges of dialogue. Stan's confederate, the hapless electric girl who is now his wife, refuses to play the role and, even, goes to the train station to escape. This leads to a bizarre scene set in a enormous train station rest-room full of dim stalls, cavenous ceilings (that del Toro features in his characteristic low-angle photography) and big, wet-looking meadows of marble and tile. In this ballpark-sized Men's room, Stan persuades Polly, the Electric woman, to collude with him in the gag, intended to extract a fortune from the gullible oligarch. In del Toro's version, the apparition of the dead girl is contrived to appear in a Central Park-sized garden with marble arches and huge flower beds, all winter-killed and the scene takes place in a blizzard-like snowstorm. The apparition representing a girl who died in an apparent botched abortion in the del Toro version, appears with gore soaking her groin and bloody hands. Of course, the stunt fails and del Toro amps up the violence, staging a savage beating of the oligarch and, then, the brutal murder of the rich man's body-guard, hurled about forty feet into the air by Stan's car and, then, for a good measure, crushed under the vehicle's tires. By comparison, the 1947 movie manages this sequence with such haste as to almost seem rushed -- there's no elaborate, overly explicit description of how the ruse will be implemented; we just see the supposedly dead girl walking zombie-like in the distance under some snowy trees; there's no bloody crotch or gruesomely gory hands. Stan doesn't viciously beat the oligarch to death and there's no body-guard to be savaged by a speeding car. Del Toro seems to think that his audience is comprised of idiots -- he draws diagrams and inserts explanatory dialogue and telegraphs all of his effects and plot points ad nauseum. Everything suffers from bloat and excessive explication.
There is no real deviation from the plot of the '47 thriller. Stan is a drifter who finds a job with an impoverished carnival. He ends up in bed with the carnival's fortune-teller, Sheena, an older woman married to a once-great Mentalist who is now a drunk. Stan accidentally kills the Mentalist by giving him a bottle of wood alcohol instead of the corn hooch that the carnival owner peddles. There's a geek, almost completely unseen, in the '47 film but here filmed in lurid detailed close-ups. Stan wonders how a man can sink so low to become a carnival geek --of course, the film will end with him doomed to accept this role once he has fallen, spectacularly, from his fortune conned out of gullible rich people in the film's second, high-society act. Stan, seduces Polly the Electric Woman, and ends up married to her. Sheena's alcoholic husband teaches Stan his mind-reading act, a performance that involves an elaborate code. With Polly, Stan goes to the Big City and becomes famous as a Mentalist, playing for big bucks in a spectral and elaborate night club. Despite warnings to not mess around with "spook show" stuff, Stan gets in cahoots with a corrupt lady psychologist and uses her files to bilk the wealthy in town -- apparently, its Buffalo, New York, a city full of vast sepulchral skyscrapers and equally huge marble mansions that look like something in Karnak or Luxor if it were always snowing along the Nile River and in the Valley of the Kings. The corrupt lady psychologist seduces Stan who actually has a back-story and, indeed, a psychology himself in this picture -- he's been abused, possibly raped by an associate of his father, has let the old man die by freezing, and has, then, stuck the corpse in a hole in the floor of the derelict farmhouse where he was raised, setting the place afire out of spite.. (None of this is a good idea -- the strength of film noir is that people are two-dimensional and monstrous; they aren't given quasi-sympathetic explanations for their villainy. In forties film noir, it's just cheerfully assumed that everyone is corrupt, venal and sadistic, and doomed; we don't need Freud to understand this. By contrast, del Toro has to give his monsters a reason, albeit an implausible one, for the wickedness that they display. There's a lot of psychoanalyzing that goes on and on in this picture and this just adds to the film's peculiarly dull gravitas.)
The 2022 picture is not without some improvements on its precursor. There's a very effective scene that is genuinely shocking involving two prominent people bilked by Stan with dire, and wholly unanticipated, consequences. People gasped in horror as this scene played-out in the theater where I saw the picture. The ending of del Toro's picture is vastly superior to the rather conflicted, and contrived, last five minutes of the '47 movie with its very faint suggestion of a (possibly) happy ending. Del Toro knows how to end his movie and does so effectively -- although, I think, he's just adopted the original end of the precursor film vetoed by studio executives as too bleak for audiences to bear. The pictorial qualities of del Toro's picture are extraordinary -- the sets are the best thing in the movie, although they are so elaborate that they distract from the film's narrative and characters. Del Toro is prestige director and the movie is chock-a-block with excellent actors -- Bradley Cooper plays the part of the ambitious hustler, a role that was made famous by Tyrone Power whose matinee-idol looks are blurred into a smarmy caricature of the movie star in the '47 film. Cate Blanchett plays the vicious psychologist. (Mary Steenburgen has a brief but indelible role.) The carnival people are enlivened by the presence of Ron Perlman who actually clarifies why it is that he insists on Polly's marriage to Stan -- something that was unclear and botched in the 1947 film. (However, I would hasten to add that these details, although making things more clear, don't really improve the 2022 version -- I assumed that Polly's relationship with her strong-man protector was based on the fact that she was sleeping with him; this was a good guess given the raunchy aspects of the carnival and its denizens as portrayed in the 1947 picture, but, apparently, wrong -- it turns out the strong man is protecting Polly out of loyalty to her deceased father.) Willem Defoe acts the role of the depraved carnival operater. Tim Blake Nelson has a small but memorable turn at the end of the movie. In general, the acting is very good, although, again, overly detailed and insufficiently abstract for this kind of genre picture. Del Toro's problem, in general, is that he wants to surpass or transcend the genre aspects of this tawdry little shocker -- making everything massive and important and pouring in gallons of pop-psychology is not the proper approach to this material. Goulding's direction of the '47 film was craftsmanlike, efficient, and stolidly unimaginative; del Toro wants to turn everything into an Oscar but undermines the vicious charm of this material with too much strenuous effort.
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