Reviewed by Colin Jacobson (April 26, 2022)
When we last saw Guillermo del Toro, he created 2017’s The Shape of Water, a flick that earned him a Best Director Oscar and also took home the award as Best Picture. Four years later, del Toro brought his follow-up, 2021’s Nightmare Alley.
Set in the late 1930s, Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper) heads out as a drifter and ends up with menial labor as part of a traveling carnival. Along the way, he works his way up the ranks and takes over as a “psychic medium” when the opportunity presents itself.
This leads Stanton to success above and beyond his lowly roots. As Stanton becomes renowned in society, his grift and his past start to catch up with him, so we see the extremes to which he will go to maintain his success and status.
In prior reviews, I mentioned that as much as I admire del Toro as an intelligent, analytical filmmaker, I rarely actually enjoy his movies. That trend continues with Alley, an exceedingly well-crafted film that leaves me mostly cold.
Alley comes from a 1946 novel by William Lindsay Gresham, and the property received a screen adaptation in 1947 that starred Tyrone Power in Cooper’s role. I never saw that one, so the del Toro version became my first encounter with the tale.
I find myself curious to view the 1947 flick simply to see if it offers a more dynamic presentation than del Toro’s lackluster product. Not that I fail to find positives, as this Alley comes with more than a few.
For one, Alley comes with an excellent cast. In addition to Cooper, we find talents such as Cate Blanchett, Toni Collette, Willem Dafoe, Ron Perlman, Rooney Mara, Richard Jenkins, Mary Steenburgen, and David Straithairn.
That’s an “A+” group of actors, and all provide more than competent work. That said, Cooper seems too old for the part, as Stanton comes across as a character who should be much younger than Cooper’s then-45 years.
For comparison, Power was 32 when he played the character. Nonetheless, Cooper does fine in the role overall, so despite this minor distraction, he holds up his end of the bargain.
A meticulous craftsman, del Toro also turns Alley into a consistently appealing cinematic product. Del Toro goes a long way to emulate the film noir styles of the 1940s, and this leads to a well-composed and designed update on the genre’s visual styles.
However, as I implied earlier, del Toro can tend to seem like he thinks, thinks, and thinks some more about every little nugget and detail involved with his movies. I feel this leads his flicks to come across as so concerned with minutiae that del Toro loses focus of the bigger picture.
Del Toro gives every aspect of his movies meaning, and in theory, it should become fascinating to work through all these components. However, because del Toro’s movies come across as so chilly and emotionally distant, I find it difficult to want to investigate their deeper concepts.
This holds true for the slow and stiff Alley. At 150 minutes, del Toro’s version runs nearly 40 minutes longer than the 1947 flick, and del Toro fails to use that space especially well.
Again, del Toro gets caught up in the details to such a degree that the movie’s narrative dawdles and lacks real thrust. Alley digs into the carny life with more specificity than the story needs, and this continues when Stanton goes up in the world, as the movie indulges in overly long “Morris the Explainer” scenes that it doesn’t need.
Somewhere buried beneath all these extraneous elements, Alley presents a potentially compelling tale of an ambitious grifter. It comes with plenty of shifty characters and shady deeds.
So why does the end result just leave me largely bored? Maybe someday del Toro will make a movie that shows his heart as well as his head, but Alley never threatens to become that film.
