Its always hard to criticize someone that you admire, especially when it comes to something so basic and subjective as story structure. It is easy to criticize explicitly bad aspects, but the structure is so subjective.
For example, I really love slow paced movies that have big climaxes. One of the earliest formations of this in my media consumption is the book series Gone. Gone comprises of Gone, Hunger, Lies, Plague, Fear and Light and is about a town where a mysterious dome appears around it, all people over 15 years old disappears and some children have strange powers.
Each book has a similar pace of building up a big event for half of the book, and then spending the second half on that event. For example, in Hunger, a lot of the first half is talking about the town losing power, and how important the nuclear power plant is. Then, the second half is a big fight for control of said plant.
This is a bit extreme for the style of pacing and structure that I mean, but it was something I really enjoyed reading as a kid. But, I can also see why people would not like that. They could be bored in the first half, or burnt out through the second half.
Plus, I love Guillermo Del Toro. Pan’s Labyrinth is incredible, The Shape of Water is deserving of the Oscars it won, Pacific Rim is uneven and strange but it is a lot of fun when its on. Crimson Peak is fun and inventive, even though the effects don’t really hold up.
Del Toro has an interesting style of writing and directing, in what I guess the best desription for it is old fairy tales. Dark stories set in a world much like our own, barring something not realistic at all (Ghosts in Crimson Peaks, the labyrinth in Pan’s Labyrinth, the fishman in The Shape of Water. They are often fairy tale-esque, in that they are often tales of morality and whimsy, punctuated with beautifully flourished exclamation points of extreme violence and horror aspects. Its wonderful to see him work at the top of his game, and through most of the runtime of Nightmare Alley, he is just that
The Positives
This movie is positively gorgeous. From the early shots of a brooding Bradley Cooper, scarcely light save for the burning ember of his cigarette to the cluttered and colourful vistas of the carnival locales to the too big, too clean, intimidating locations of the big city, this movie looks totally amazing.
Bradley Cooper is getting early talk of another Oscar nomination as Stanton Carlisle, a drifter who finds great opportunity in a travelling circus. Willem Dafoe, Toni Collette, Ron Perlman and Richard Jenkins all do their regular strong character work as the ringleader, psychic, strongman and eccentric millionaire respectively.
The second half of the film is strongly carried by Cate Blanchette, who I swear was born to be framed by the dramatic lighting that Del Toro bathes her in in almost every frame. All the acting and the cinematography and set design are strong across the board.
The writing and storytelling is also a very strong aspect of the movie, if it does have one problem. The story has a strong sense of momentum, and keeps enough of its cards close to the chest to keep audiences engaged.
The mystery of Stanton’s past is a driving force in the story, and there is enough subtle foreshadowing, from an ominous tarot card reading to Clem’s line directly mentioning the title of the film, for the watchers to have fun predicting where the story is going, and watch the puzzle pieces fall together.
Why A Story Is Told As It Is?
Okay, so this is tough. Storytelling has rules, generally, that can be learned through schooling, or just by consuming media and seeing what works for you, what doesn’t work and why. That’s what this site is for really, just a personal thought experiment to analyze and learn from storytelling. And if anyone else likes it, well that is just peachy.
Another common statement is that rules are meant to be broken. I mean, if rules weren’t broken we would never had movies like Pulp Fiction (rule: generally tell your story in chronological order). And if you are a master of storytelling, like Quentin Tarantino (writer/director of the aforementioned Pulp Fiction), or I would consider Guillermo Del Toro in that category, the rules can be less and less important. If a lesser writer tried to tackle Pulp Fiction, it would come out as a complete mess.
So what’s the rule being broken in Nightmare Alley?
Unfortunately, this is where some minor spoilers come into effect. I will try to keep them to a minimum, but when talking about the story, you kind of have to talk about the plot.
Ostensibly, Nightmare Alley is two stories, or more precisely, two halves of the same story with little connective tissue between them. There is a time jump, a drastic change in location, and outside of one scene, a complete change of cast outside of Bradley Cooper’s Stanton Carlisle and his electric-lady-turned-psychic-partner Molly played by Rooney Mara.
So, there are two ways to play this. Either straight up divide the movie in half (or however long two chunks) and have no change in time save for brief flashbacks set before the film begins, or interweave the two stories to play incongruently.
Del Toro decided to keep the two halves as separate as possible. And since he likes fairy tales and fables, let us spin a little yarn of our own.
Cloud Atlas
Cloud Atlas the movie is a decisive one. For me, its up there with the original Matrix as the Wachioski’s best work (not saying much, given their uneven backlog). But there are many people thag dislike the movie for the length, performances or convuluted story.
Well, Cloud Atlas is based on a book written by David Mitchell and I have read it. There are many differences between the movie and book, but the biggest one is the structure.
Cloud Atlas is composed of a handful of vastly different stories. They are tied together thematically and by the idea of reincarnation.
In the Wachowskis’ film the stories, for lack of a better term, happen at the same time. The film flips between these stories constantly, and many of them rise up, climax and descend together. If you can get into the story, it is extremely satisfying to watch.
David Mitchell’s book is structured completely different. The first story, a man on a ship, takes up the first and last chapters of the novel. The next story takes up the second and second last chapters, and so on until the last story is a larger chapter in the middle, and the pattern repeats in reverse.
There are positives and negatives to each approach. Mitchell’s novel is much easier to follow, as each you have to only follow one story at a time instead of bouncing between all of them. But you lose the sense of connectiveness when all the stories come together at just the right moment during the film.
But to be fair, it wouldn’t work quite as well in book form if all the stories climaxed together. Film is so kineti, fast and visual. Just a one second shot can communicate what story we are in and what is happening. One second! To say what would take a novel a paragraph to say. And that’s not a bad thing, but its impossible to mimic the speed and tempo a well timed scene can have in book form. Or at least very tough.
So really, its up to you which you prefer. The distinct chunks, or everytjing being mixed together. But really, is depends on the story being told.
Are We There Yet?
Nightmare Alley takes the Cloud Atlas novel approach of keeping the two stories it is telling at arms length of each other. There are no flash forwards in the first half of the movie, and scant few flashbacks in the back half (at least to events that took place during the first half of the movie).
The problem with that is that the runtime for Nightmare Alley is two hours and twenty minutes, the longest Guillermo Del Toro movie to date (beating Shape of Water by 18 minutes). By any standards, that is a long movie, but Nightmare Alley justifies this long runtime by having . relatively fast pace, and lots of stuff going on to keep audiences entertained. There isn’t anything that sticks out as distinctly cutable without losing something from the experience and its hard to not be entertained throughout.
The problem is that with a few rewrites, this could easily be two good, full length movies. Now that inherently isn’t a bad thing. The problem is that it might make the film overlong to moviegoers.
The circus portion of the movie has a clear beginning, middle and end. When the two years later tag comes, its hard to decipher whether this is just an epilogue, a third act, or a whole half of a movie. If people are expecting the movie to be finished, or have fallen head over heels for the narrative beforehand.
Tangent on Theatres and Toilets
Now I saw this movie in theatres, I think the only way to see it right now, and thankfully I am in a part of the world that still has theatres open.
Due to the rise of streaming and this whole pandemic business, its become the trendy to hate on the whole theatre-going experience.
Personally, maybe because I haven’t seen quite as many movies as some others, I have not had a bad theatre-going experience. Even in this showing, some teenagers talking in the back corner did not ruin it.
In fact, at times it has raised the experience considerably. Krampus starring Adam Scott is a fine enough film, but one moment burns it in my mind. The titular Krampus is doing some Yuletide shenanigans on the roof, and our doomed group of protagonists are sitting in the living room.
“Must be squirrels,” the grouchy old grandma opines. Then a loud bang comes, followed by “Playing with their nuts.”
Hey, not all jokes are winners and this one went about as well as you expect. Silence for a beat, and then one man lets out a huge, belly-laugh, all-out guffaw, and then the whole theatre laughed along. You can’t buy that. The guy was with a girl, and she didn’t seem to be having the best time. I hope they are doing okay.
But, to get slightly on track, the theatre does offer some downsides. There are no subtitles, but that isn’t a huge deal. My partner turned me on to them. Its just handy to catch all the dialogue fully sometimes, and you hardly notice they’re there.
The other, bigger, problem is the lack of pausing ability to use the toilet. Yeah, its unfortunate to have to pick your spots to do the least amount of damage, and run and do your business as quick as possible. Or try to hold it in as long as possible and miss the climax á la me at Arrival (I’ve seen it multiple times since, so I do know how a certain phonecall was made, but the first time I missed it. I was so mad, my friend convinced my other friend I was storming out because I hated it).
And then there’s The Last Jedi. Its not good, but I hate missing anything, so I was determined to sit through the whole thing. It didn’t hurt that I felt I had to go sometime after Kylo Ren killed Snoke, and they were having a big fight in a Star Destroyer that was destroyed in the one good shot of the film. Sounds like the finale, I can hold it for a few minutes.
I should’ve known. The film was mindlessly going against expectations, so why not tack a different climax and another half an hour? And let me tell you, that planet needlessly made out of salt (get it? You expected it to be snow, but its not!) felt like forever.
While I’m not saying the last half of Nightmare Alley took forever, but at the start of the time jump, it might have felt longer than it had to be.
The Quick Fix
The disappointing thing is that the story had a built in way to fix this problem.
You can make it into two movies, but that’s a tough sell. The first has to have done well enough to afford a second (and putting it up against Spiderman essentially doomed it), and then you have to sell a sequel that’s fairly loosely tied to the first. Little to no common locations and very few of the same characters.
Unfortunately, to explain this will go into further spoilers of the plot.
Stan uses his newfound pseudopsychic abilities to put on a hit show in the city, but finds a better grift in being a personal consultant/psychic to the uber-rich with dead people problems. Dr. Ritter is a psychatrist who figures out Stan’s game and gets cut into the deal.
The thing is, Dr. Ritter doesn’t want his money to spill the beans on her upper crust clients, she wants information on Stan’s past.
What better way to organically involve long flashback sequences than to frame them around Dr. Ritter’s psychiatric sessions with Stan. It meters out the information to Dr. Ritter and the audience in a natural way.
Because in reality you will always have a favourite. Ask any parent about their favourite child and they will lie and say they love both equally. But even though both of them are great there will always be one of them that you connect to more than the other.
Both halves of Nightmare Alley are great and well done. But no matter how great they are, you will always like one more than the other. One half will always bring the other down because it simply is just not as good as the other. And by having the halves so seperate, it just drives the difference that much further.
So shoukd you watch Nightmare Alley? Yes. All of it is pretty much fantastic, if you can stomach the long runtime. Its Guillermo Del Toro. Its just unfortunate that it maybe could’ve been better.
The Sensations of Storytelling 