yv_es

Nightmare Alley starts promisingly enough. The casting and acting is good, and the 1940s circus setting is full of potential. The film almost even had me fooled for the first hour or so.

But then I started to see through the film's tricks. What I mistook for the character's depth and complexity was soon revealed to be nothing more than caricatures ripped from a Screenwriting 101. And soon I could clearly see the course that had been charted for them too. Minute by minute, the people on screen felt less like humans and more like puppets hurtling towards an entirely predicable conclusion. This robbed the film and the central relationship in it of any of the emotional weight it had once had.

Farther along I actively started to resent the film makers for taking the film in the direction they did. It felt emotionally manipulative. Yet at the same time, Nightmare Alley never commits enough to shake off the air of being a PG rated tale from Sin City. That leaves the film dangling in an uncomfortable spot: it mistakes being gritty with having emotional heft, but is also scared to fully commit to grittiness / noir / the surreal because it is still clinging to an undergrad's pretensions of telling some very human and very important story.

And without going into full on spoiler territory, the end of the film is truly insufferable. The whole time you're thinking, "Oh no, there's no way they'd have the sheer audacity to try pulling something that stupid off!" But no! Off go the film makers, leaping headlong into the stupidity with such grinning gusto that I felt viscerally embarrassed for them.

There's no angle from which I can recommend Nightmare Alley. It's certainly not good noir. It also does very little beyond the obvious with its traveling circus / freak show trappings. The acting is the high point, but this is undercut by the plot. And at two and a half hours, Nightmare Alley really gives you time to bask in the vast creative and emotional emptiness that lies just beneath its occasionally flashy posturing.

Last and First Men contains some of the most beautiful shots ever committed to film. At points the visual and sonic composition come together with such raw force that I was left on the verge of tears.

Last and First Men also feels long at only 70 minutes. Shots linger and linger. There are almost comically long pauses in the already sparse story. You can almost feel the pretentiousness washing over you.

That story is also a mixed blessing: at time evocative and at others silly. The sparseness of the narration and abstractness of the images gives your mind plenty of space to wander. I found this refreshing. Others may not.

If your mind does wander though, perhaps you will wonder: what is the connection between the story and the images? Is what we see meant to be a literal representation of what the narrator is describing? A figurative one? Maybe what unites the two is the concept of communication across time?

You can treat the film as an intellectual problem or you can just treat it as a purely sensory experience. Could be interesting. But do yourself a favor and watch it in a theater. Some of the film's magic would be lost outside of a darkened room.

Although I am a big Terry Gilliam fan, even I have to admit that even his best films can be most charitably described as beautiful messes. While The Fisher King is very much a mess of a film in the classic Gilliam vein, unfortunately it lands with a dull thud instead of soaring to the heights of a Brazil.

The plot is very heavy handed and for the most part lacks the charm of Gilliam's other work. The handling of mental illness is especially clunky, which I felt made the film's attempts at compassion feel hollow. There's also a baffling love story that is never justified. Why is Robin William's character so taken by a woman who is both graceless and sometimes even verges on rude? And why is she (so predictably) won over by him? We are just supposed to accept that that's the way it is.

And that's the way it is for much of The Fisher King: things just happen because they do, not because they make sense from a storytelling or character development perspective

If there's one reason to watch The Fisher King though, it's Robin Williams. Even though his character is not great, there are still a number of fun scenes where he is basically just playing Robin Williams. It's a real delight, perhaps only topped by Michael Jeter's absurdly good song and dance number.

Yes even a bad Gilliam film still has some very memorable moments. I just wish there were more of them here. As it stands though, The Fisher King is too long and too clumsy in all the wrong ways.