NIGHTMARE ALLEY (2021) ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Guillermo del Toro
Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, Toni Collette,
Rooney Mara, Willem Dafoe, David Strathairn,
Richard Jenkins, Ron Perlman, Mary Steenburgen,
Tim Blake Nelson, Jim Beaver, Clifton Collins Jr.
Guillermo del Toro's remake of the 1947 film noir about a carnival hustler's descent into the abyss. One of the things that makes the best noir films work is their narrative economy. They give you just enough information to string you along. This movie gives you a lot of information, maybe too much, and at 2 hours and 30 minutes, it runs into overtime. It's also a movie that probably shouldn't be in color, though del Toro's visuals are always something to look at. He makes the carnival look dirty and depressed, the kind of place you'd never want to be. After a while, even the customers start looking like freaks. Bradley Cooper plays the protagonist, and he's good, but like Joaquin Phoenix in Woody Allen's "Irrational Man", his character's got a deficit when it comes to charisma. You find yourself wondering why all of the story's hot, smart women keep falling for him. That would be Rooney Mara as a sideshow performer whose specialty is being electrocuted, Toni Collette as the fortune teller whose cards predict Cooper's fate, and Cate Blanchett as a psychiatrist with a fabulous art-deco office, the film's resident femme fatale. If they gave Oscars for lipstick, Blanchett would win one, hands down.
