ALLEY WHOOP

Opening this weekend...

Nightmare Alley--"Geek" has now become roughly analogous to "nerd" or "extreme enthusiast." But the term once had horrific connotations; it was carny slang for a sideshow performer who would do ghastly acts--bite the heads off of live chickens, for instance--usually to feed an alcohol or drug habit. The bottom rung of show business (I almost wrote "the bottom rung of humanity" but then I remembered the 45th President and his cronies), this revolting occupation was the jumping-off point for William Lindsay Gresham's classic lower-depths novel Nightmare Alley (1946).

An atmospheric if softened-up movie of it was made in 1947 with Tyrone Power as Stan, the newbie carny who looks at the geek and knows he could never fall to such a degraded level. Bradley Cooper plays Stan in this gorgeously stylized new version from the great Guillermo del Toro, working from an adaptation he co-wrote with Sunset Gun maven Kim Morgan.

Stan, a drifter running away from something awful, makes himself useful as a laborer to a desolate midwestern carny. Soon he's learning the tricks of fortune-telling and mind-reading acts, which here are so talmudical that earning an honest living seems like it would be far easier. He learns how to calm down an angry cop, and how to dispose of a geek who's outlived his usefulness, and where to find a new one. 

And the work brings out Stan's creative side; soon he's designed a spectacular new "electric chair" act for the lovely Molly (Rooney Mara). He's also taught a weird sort of hustler ethic; the veteran fortune-teller Zeena (Toni Collette, magnificent as ever) warns him against doing a "spookshow," that is, actually faking a manifestation of a departed loved one.

This first half, set in the carny amongst its disreputable but mostly warm and likable denizens, is darkly delightful, visually sumptuous and full of terrific, potent acting and pungent dialogue. As with both the novel and the earlier film version, the second half, in which Stan leaves the carny to start a higher-end mentalist scam--and foolishly ignores Zeena's advice--is less engaging. His scenes as the hapless fly in the parlor of a lacquered, satanic psychoanalyst (Cate Blanchett), though entertaining enough, border on camp, and are a little oppressive after the buoyant, motley first act.

Still, this is a rich and absorbing melodrama. Actors seem to thrive in front of del Toro's camera, and alongside the leads and the wondrous Collette, scene-stealers here include Willem Dafoe as the candidly heartless boss, Ron Perlman as an avuncular carny and, perhaps best of all, David Strathairn as Pete, Stan's washed-up, gently rueful mentor. Even in the second half, there's a splendid quick turn by Mary Steenburgen, and Richard Jenkins is scary, and briefly piteous, as the cold-hearted tycoon for whom Stan puts on his spookshow.

Finally, a word should be said for Paul Anderson, as the geek. He plays the part to the hilt, yet without hamming, and with a dreadful glimpse of the human being he was.

VAN FICTION

Opening this weekend at Arizona Mills IMAX...

Nomadland--Frances McDormand is Fern, a widow left adrift after her gypsum mining village in Nevada becomes a ghost town. She wanders the western states in her beloved van, which she calls "Vanguard," following seasonal work, and connects with the subculture of van and RV nomads with a hub in Quartzsite, Arizona. She works cleaning state parks or in the kitchen at Wall Drug in South Dakota, at a beet harvest in Nebraska, at an Amazon facility in Nevada. She makes friends; a fellow nomad named Dave (David Strathairn) might even be a love interest, although Fern is cautious in such matters.

Scripted and directed by Chloe Zhao, this adaptation of Jessica Bruder's nonfiction book feels like a true original, heartwarming without sentimentality, maybe a hair slow but beautifully acted and shot. McDormand and Strathairn are the only two professional actors that I recognized; most of the rest of the cast, including "vandwelling" YouTube guru Bob Wells, use their own names and play themselves, with great warmth and poignancy. This gives the movie the quality of a documentary, but with a movie star presence at its center.

And it need hardly be said that McDormand is wonderful; Fern is another of her classic sensible yet frayed at the edges creations. She gets across Fern's aching sadness at finding herself at such a cosmically loose end, but she also shows us the exhilaration she feels at her independence. Whenever Fern is tempted with an offer of permanence, her instinct is to move on. Maybe when Kris Kristofferson observed that freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose, Fern's lifestyle is what he meant.

Also opening today...

Minari--Lee Isaac Chung wrote and directed this autobiographical chronicle of a Korean family struggling to start a farm in rural Arkansas in the early 1980s. Dad Jacob (Steven Yeun) is an expert "chicken-sexer" (able to quickly determine the sex of chicks at a hatchery and sort them). He's dragged his family from California to the south, to the horror of his pretty, pious wife Monica (Han Ye-ri), because he wants to start a produce farm specializing in Korean vegetables and fruits for what he perceives as a growing immigrant market in Dallas and Oklahoma City (the title refers to an herb popular in Korean cuisine).

The couple and their two young children, Annie (Noel Kate Cho) and David (Alan Kim) are eventually joined by a mischievous, fun-loving Grandma (Youn Yuh-jung), who doesn't seem to David to act like a grandma is supposed to. There's also a showcase role for Will Patton, as a religiously ecstatic, tongue-speaking farm hand trying to help Jacob realize his dream.

This may be the best film I've seen so far this year; a contemporary take on the early-'30s dramas about ordinary people up against agricultural and meteorological fate, like Murnau's City Girl or Dovzhenko's Earth. As in those films, the antagonists are largely elemental: water, fire, health. But Minari's characters aren't emblematic; they have a psychological subtlety and reality, and their passions and priorities also drive the conflict. The story-telling is simple, but the problems these people have with the land, and with each other, are anything but.

The Mauritanian--The title character, played with disconcerting charm by the Algerian-French actor Tahar Rahim, is Mohamedou Ould Salahi, who was held at Guantanamo Bay for a decade and a half, and tortured, without ever being charged with a crime, on suspicion of having been a recruiter for 9/11 terrorists. Jodie Foster and Shailene Woodley are the pro bono lawyers working to free Salahi under habeas corpus, and getting stonewalled by U.S. intelligence. Benedict Cumberbatch is the Marine officer assigned to prosecute Salahi, who finds himself equally stonewalled.

Directed by the capable Scotsman Kevin Macdonald, this is another of the surprisingly large class of political dramas like The Report or Official Secrets or Fair Game, which remind us of the constitutional outrages of the W. Bush administration, as well as the failure of the Obama administration to rectify most of them. Macdonald sets a unhurried pace, and generates a steadily waxing sense of almost Kafkaesque fury and horror. It's a well-acted, compelling movie and it can boil your blood. And it should.

SETTLING FOR SECOND BEST

Opening this week: 

The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel—This sequel to the easygoing 2012 comedy about aging Brits retiring to a crumbling but comfortable hotel in Jaipur, India doesn’t stretch the material very far. It’s just more of the same, with most of the stars—Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Bill Nighy, Celia Imrie, Ronald Pickup, Penelope Wilton and Diana Hardcastle—returning for more mild antics.

Dev Patel is back too, as the overenthusiastic young manager, along with the imposing Lillete Dubey as his stern but attractive mother and Tina Desae as his gorgeous fiancée. Richard Gere also turns up as a mystery man at the hotel, presumably a bone tossed to the American market.

So there are new romances and adventures and intrigues. In perhaps the cleverest of them, ladies' man Pickup comes to suspect that he may have inadvertently taken out a hit on his girlfriend—this strand could actually be a solid basis for a pretty good noir thriller.

But we’re never asked to take it seriously here. Nothing too upsetting happens, and the movie climaxes with a big Bollywood-style dance to that irresistible music.

It’s no big deal, but you read that cast, right? The movie almost can’t be a complete waste with any of them in it, let alone all.

Around midpoint, Dench and Smith exchange a few commonplace lines, with the subtext that both of them know a piece of difficult news that one isn’t discussing. All the mastery that these two have accumulated over their careers is there, in the steely compassion undergirding this short scene. It made Second Best Exotic worth sitting through all by itself