The world is one big carnival, and we’re all just suckers — or “marks,” in the parlance of the traveling grifters so effective at fleecing those poor rubes who are not with it — in Guillermo del To…
.” A perfect match of material to auteur, William Lindsay Gresham’s pulpy 1946 novel and the shockingly dark studio picture it inspired give the helmer, hot off his Oscar win for “The Shape of Water,” a chance to go full-film noir, resulting in a gorgeous, fantastically sinister moral fable about the cruel predictability of human nature and the way entire systems — from carnies and con men to shrinks and Sunday preachers — are engineered to exploit it.
Through this desperate man’s eyes, we discover a tight-knit community of outcasts and entertainers who tentatively accept a fellow sinner into their circle. But Stan is never truly embraced as “one of us” — that oft-quoted mantra of Tod Browning’s “Freaks,” the reigning classic of this milieu, against which “Nightmare Alley” must inevitably be judged — and for good reason. Cooper comes to the table with charm in spades.
Whereas the novel supplies Stan with an elaborate Freudian backstory — a lifetime of resentment over the father who disappointed and the mother who deserted him — del Toro and co-writer Kim Morgan prefer to leave the character’s past unspecified, inviting audiences to provide their own explanations for what he’s running from .
Alternately conniving and seductive, the ensuing power dance between these two master manipulators puts “Nightmare Alley” right up there with “Sunset Boulevard” , “There Will Be Blood” and other period studies of opposing forces.
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