Review: Expanded Development in Del Toro’s New ‘Nightmare Alley’ is a Double Edged Sword
“People are desperate to tell you who they are … desperate to be seen.”
Guillermo Del Toro’s adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham’s novel Nightmare Alley is something of a mixed bag. On one hand, it proves to be the better of the two cinematic adaptions, the other being Edmund Goulding’s 1947 effort, by meaningfully expanding underdeveloped characters and adding some much need humanist touches. On the other, it does so at the expense of brevity, adding forty minutes to the runtime Goulding used to total nearly two and half hours. Seemingly paradoxical, these two points are both the film’s greatest strength and weakness, ultimately creating a film that feels justified in its creation while also stretching thin the interesting elements of Nightmare Alley.
Our story follows Staton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper) who joins a traveling circus that specializes in oddities of the human species, a reoccurring consortium for Del Toro. There he meets the mystical Zeena (Toni Collette) who passes on a showman’s code to Stanton after her husband’s untimely death. With it, Stanton can put on an act where he accurately names any item in the audience, provided he has an assistant who can articulate the code, found in fellow carnie and love-interest Molly (Rooney Mara).
After becoming wildly successful and adept at predicting not only objects, but also people’s past histories, he starts leveraging his skill to exploit emotionally vulnerable individuals in the pursuit of extracting their money. One such individual is Ezra Grindle (Richard Jenkins), a powerful man of industry who promises Stanton a fortune if he can alleviate his lingering guilt brought on by his deceased wife. Naturally, Stanton’s greed gets the best of him and he starts flying too close to the sun as his long con slowly unravels.
Goulding’s Nightmare Alley was an exceedingly seedy noir for its time — depictions of sexual innuendo, cruel exploitations, and malfeasance never felt so explicit for 1947 Hollywood. In a 2021 context, much of the same taboo seediness from replicated plot points doesn’t have the same impact that it once had. Perhaps we’re a more mature audience now, but it might also be from Del Toro’s focused interest in moral decay, which makes some of Stanton’s actions more conclusive and logical, albeit from a very immoral position.
In this area, Del Toro has the most to give with his iteration, most notably with how he humanizes the ‘geek’ — a mentally ill, alcohol and drug dependent individual who is exploited by the traveling circus to carryout grotesque acts. In the original film adaptation, the geek is never shown, only explained in relation to Stanton’s ultimate demise. Here, right out the gate, Del Toro humanizes the geek with sympathy, turning the on lookers into complacent enablers who promote this kind of exploitation and making the film’s tragedy all the more woeful.
Another notable improvement is Grindle’s character. The 1947 character is a pure plot mechanic who tempts Stanton beyond a point of no return. Where that instance made Grindle a complete fool, a wet noodle who folds under the slightest act of deception, this new version emanates a threatening aura in large part to a menacing performance from Richard Jenkins. Though he falls for Stanton’s ruse, it is not without adequate development on Del Toro’s part, selling the idea that Grindle is so enveloped by grief that he is willing to forgo conventional wisdom to attain something his money never could.
What the film lacks, however, is conciseness. In his pursuit of rectifying developmental shortcomings of Goulding’s adaptation, Del Toro ends up overworking the material, thinning out character beats across several, separate individual scenes and adding much more to the film than was probably needed. Case in point is a subplot with a county judge that serves as a stepping stone for Stanton to get to Grindle; its inclusion furthers our understanding of Stanton’s ability to con others — which at this point in the film is already developed at great length — but it probably could have been folded into another scene to save time. Expanded development also takes place heavily in the first act when Stanton first arrives at the traveling circus; between Zeena, Molly, and the circus’s ringleader Clem (Wilem Dafoe), there is ample setup for the moral decay that follows. Discerning between supplemental excess and much-needed development is where Nightmare Alley struggles to strike the right balance, and in its efforts to give us more, the film inadvertently ends up taking away from its overall pace. Consider it a double edged sword.
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