Some people love a nice, cheerful movie at holiday time. For everyone else, there’s Nightmare Alley, Guillermo del Toro’s thoughtful and darkly glamourous reimagining of both William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 novel and the 1947 film noir that sprang from its dark seed, starring Tyrone Power and Joan Blondell. Del Toro’s Nightmare Alley, set in the waning days of the Depression, is neither a remake nor a strict adaptation, but rather a melding of both, its own sleek, obsidian creature. It marries the despair of Gresham’s superb, unsparing novel with the creepy angularity of Edmund Goulding’s film version. And it features a terrific, multitextured performance by Bradley Cooper as the story’s ambitious, amoral antihero, Stanton Carlisle, who begins as a carny underling, rises to become a show-biz smash, and ultimately—well, never mind for now where he ends up. It’s enough to say that Cooper ably meets every demand the film makes of him. This an unnervingly compassionate portrait of a truly bad egg.
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We first meet Stan just as he’s committed what we’re sure is a crime—we see the coverup, but not the deed, and then we watch as he boards a bus to a town that might be called Nowhere, Anywhere. He hops off and somehow insinuates himself, like a parasite, into the workings of a traveling carnival. He tells barker Clem Hoatley (a suitably crusty, calculating Willem Dafoe) that he’ll do any odd job. He also learns about a carnival attraction so inhumane that some performers won’t join a troupe that features one. The individuals who apply for this job have reached the depths of human desperation; those who take advantage of them are perhaps only nominally human.
Stan learns the ropes of carnival life quickly, even as he gets a hand—in a manner of speaking—from the troupe’s resident medium, Zeena (Toni Collette). Zeena’s husband, Pete (David Strathairn), helps her with his act, managing as well as his debilitating alcoholism allows. Before…
Source : time
