Nightmare Alley 2021
B
Guillermo del Toro has been building an impressive reputation and now can film what he wants with a big budget and a great cast. Nightmare Alley is loaded with stars and looks great, recreating carnivals and Chicago around 1941. Still, despite some Oscar buzz mostly for performances, the movie has not gotten stellar reviews and was a box office bomb. I still figured it would be worth watching, and it is, but it is also a little disappointing. It is filmed very much as a film noir, but the plot lacks the intricacies of that kind of movie and by the end I felt a little ripped off. It feels like all the elements are there, but del Toro couldn’t put it together. Based on a book and a 1947 movie, maybe it is just the material, but there were clues along the way with things that didn’t quite work or make much sense, but I don’t want to get into any spoilers. It is worth watching, but by the time you realize you've been swindled, you will have already paid for your ticket and be heading for the exit.
spoilers
Some of the early things that didn’t make sense were Ron Perlman punching out Stan for messing with Molly, but then he seems okay with it the next day after someone dies? Did Stan intentionally give Peter wood alcohol? And who in their right mind keeps poison in exactly the same type of bottle as liquor? I think the movie was supposed to be a prophetic morality tale as Peter warns Stan not to believe in his own powers and Willem Dafoe talks about how he gets carnival geeks (a story that doesn’t make a lot of sense; everything in the carnival is a fake except the destitute geek?). So it seems like we should have seen a downward spiral for Stan. Instead he seems like he is doing okay for the most part, except he takes a drink. I was hoping there would be some kind of double cross or something like in Double Indemnity instead of just having Stan’s con go bad, which is basically what happened. There are some decent pieces at work as Cate Blanchett pretends not to want money and Cooper says sometimes you have to put money at stake to win big later. It felt like there were some very clever people and in the end they acted in pretty unclever ways.
Written: 22 Dec 2021