In the Flesh: Nightmare Alley (2021)

I’ll never understand the interest directors have in Bradley Cooper. He has neither the flinty, affected intensity of Cruise or Fiennes nor the bland likeability of Hanks. He has no physical presence, no sexual aura, no edge, no menace, and his voice is pure dishwater. He can carry a comedic role with his long face and large, bright eyes, but as a leading man he’s about as gripping as cold oatmeal. Only in the final moments of Guillermo Del Toro’s remake of the 1947 classic Nightmare Alley does Cooper dig deep enough to find something real, laughing with an unsettling combination of real merriment and empty desperation as he realizes just how far he’s fallen. It’s a meager reward for sitting through two and a half hours of overlit and under-saturated tedium, a smorgasbord of mediocrity headed up by Cooper himself and ably supported by both other habitual medium talents (Rooney Mara, as dull here as she is in Carol) and typically excellent actors (David Strathairn, Toni Colette, Richard Jenkins, Ron Perlman) weighed down by a meandering, undercooked script.

Only Cate Blanchett really knows what kind of movie she’s in and how to make it sing, vamping it up to near-Dracula levels of simmering menace as manipulative psychiatric analyst Dr. Lilith Ritter. Her waxy white foundation and blood-red lipstick make her pop on camera in a way none of the film’s other players really does. She’s also as close as Nightmare Alley gets to believable sexuality, but opposite Cooper it’s like watching a dominatrix try to bend wet bread to her will. It helps that her segments are the most clearly noir-inspired, for while Del Toro’s latest was heavily advertised as neo noir it connects only tenuously to the genre. It’s much closer to formulaic dramatic Oscar bait than the director’s ever come before, its shot compositions staid and unimaginative, its lighting only occasionally finding the sharp interplay of light and shadow which is as definitively the mark of real film noir as any other single element.

Alas, even Blanchett’s deliciously cruel and cutting delivery of “you’re just an Okie with straight teeth” can’t sell a movie that’s about ninety minutes too long and contains exactly one good performance. Even the always delightful Tim Blake Nelson is flattened into wallpaper in his brief appearance, and in the film’s sagging middle stretch where much of the dramatic tension rests on Cooper and Mara is borderline unwatchable. The film does strip a few shreds of sentimentality away from the original script, but its inflated running time and lackluster cast doom it to middling status from the jump. A few bog-standard psychological insights, a few scenes of fast-paced flim-flam none of the cast but Blanchett — who never gets a shot at it — can even speak quickly enough to sell, and then bang. Curtain down.