When the 2022 Oscar nominations were released last week, most of the headlines went to the plodding The Power of the Dog, which made history by making Jane Campion the first female director to receive two Oscar nominations for best director. Campion’s first nomination was for a genuine masterpiece, 1993’s The Piano, not a film overhyped by the media. It also made history as the first movie to score 12 Oscar nominations while being actually more interesting to talk about than to watch. Also making headlines was the fact that two real-life couples each garnered Oscar nominations: Javier Bardem for his wonderful performance as Desi Arnaz in the otherwise lifeless Being the Ricardos and Penelope Cruz in Parallel Mothers, and Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemons in the aforementioned slogfest The Power of the Dog. Then there is Will Smith receiving his first Oscar nomination in over 15 years for his role as the visionary, hard-driving father of two tennis legends in King Richard and Denzel Washington receiving an Oscar nomination for his role as a different, and somewhat more infamous, sort of king in The Tragedy of Macbeth, the first film directed by only one of the Coen brothers. Steven Spielberg gained a lot of attention for becoming the first director to receive Oscar nominations in a nearly unfathomable six different decades with his best director nomination for his remake of West Side Story.
There has also been a lot of talk about Dune and its 10 Oscar nominations — a pleasant surprise for a film of such commercial as well as artistic ambition. There’s Kenneth Branagh’s beautiful, heartwarming Belfast and its seven Oscar nominations, Andrew Garfield’s splendid Oscar-nominated turn at Rent writer Jonathan Larson in Tick, Tick…Boom!, and Kristen Stewart’s inexplicable best actress nomination for her awful turn as Princess Diana in Spencer. And there’s the equally inexplicable snubbing of Ben Affleck, who gave audiences two of the most memorable performances on celluloid this past year — as the delightfully debauched Pierre d’Alencon in The Last Duel and the “uncle we all wish we had” in The Tender Bar.
But almost no one is talking about Nightmare Alley, a remake of a 1947 movie based on a novel by William Lindsay Gresham of the same name, starring Tyrone Power and directed by Edmund Goulding. The remake, directed by acclaimed filmmaker Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, The Shape of Water), netted four Oscar nominations, including a nomination for best picture. Del Toro marries his distinctive visionary style and flair for fantasy and horror to one of the classic American cinematic genres: film noir. And if the results are not exactly a marriage made in heaven, it is certainly a marriage worth witnessing.
Del Toro’s version of Nightmare Alley stars Bradley Cooper as Stanton Carlisle, a down-on-his-luck con man with a troubled past and multiple albatrosses hanging from his neck who doesn’t have much going for him other than his skill in hucksterism and his matinee-idol good looks. These two traits serve him in good stead when he stumbles on a carnival, one of those singular institutions of old-fashioned Americana that is somehow able to conjure sepia-toned nostalgia, seedy charlatanism, and nightmarish terror, sometimes alternatively and sometimes all at once. Ray Bradbury mined the first and third of these qualities of American carnivals in his classic 1962 novel Something Wicked This Way Comes, and The Simpsons writer John Swartzwelder has frequently mined the comic aspects of the second quality of carnivals. The character of Carlisle, as portrayed by Cooper, is a character study in the graver, more sober aspects of this second quality, supplemented with doses of the film’s outstanding Oscar-nominated production design, costume design, and cinematography.
Carlisle worms his way into the carnival run by the eccentric carny Clem Hoatley (Willem Dafoe) and takes eagerly to the mentalism act of Zeena the Seer (Toni Collette) and her energy-sapped husband, Pete (David Strathairn). The skilled swindler Carlisle, dressed occasionally (and fittingly) like Harold Hill of The Music Man, knows a good scheme when he sees one, and he spots one in Pete and Zeena’s act. He tries to use his suave seductive abilities on both Pete and Zeena in an attempt to ply more information out of them about their act. Pete is reluctant to divulge his secrets. He implies that they’re too dangerous to share, but Carlisle doesn’t care. When he discovers Pete’s weakness for alcohol, he uses his newfound knowledge to his advantage, and against Pete’s, leading to Pete’s accidental death.
Meanwhile, Carlisle has become enamored of the carnival’s “electric girl” Molly (Rooney Mara). He convinces her to join him in his pursuit of riches by performing as a psychic. With techniques purloined from Zeena and Pete, Carlisle and Molly, who have fallen in love with each other, abscond from the carnival and strike up a successful psychic act in Buffalo. Their show is a big hit, regularly selling out multiple acts per day. But the avaricious Carlisle still isn’t satisfied. When he finds out about a local rich man named Ezra Grindle (Richard Jenkins) who grieves for his dead lover and would do and pay anything to see her again, Carlisle knows he had found his mark of a lifetime. With the help of a femme fatale evocatively named Dr. Lilith Ritter, who is played with an abundance of charm mixed with just the right measure of menace by the very busy Cate Blanchett, short off of terrific turns in this past year’s Don’t Look Up and The French Dispatch, Carlisle plots to convert his abilities to manipulate Grindle’s emotional vulnerabilities into a personal fortune.
Because this is noir, we know that things will not exactly work out for our hero as planned, but what is most compelling is the way that Carlisle’s misfortunes in the pursuit of his fortune come about. Del Toro and fellow screenwriter Kim Morgan weave a tight web of shadowy backgrounds and even more shadowy intrigue, letting the carefully woven plot gradually and beguilingly spool out. At times, the various scenarios that del Toro develops take too long to play out, making the film drag in the early and middle sections, but the time invested in a close watch of the movie pays off in the tension-filled third act, which takes place in the backdrop of America’s entrance into World War II, and in Nightmare Alley’s nightmarish final shot. With its stylish, shadow-filled cinematography, remarkable ensemble cast rounded out by Ron Perlman, Mary Steenburgen, and Tim Blake Nelson, and del Toro’s rich abilities in world creation, Nightmare Alley is positioned to be a best picture dark horse at next month’s Academy Awards. At the very least, it would be a strong contender for “most intriguing picture” of the year.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and a postdoctoral research scholar at the University of Salzburg.
