Blanchett subverts film archetype
With a touch of Barbara Stanwyck, a sumptuous Art Deco office and a deadly shade of crimson lipstick, Cate Blanchett plays a femme fatale in Guillermo del Toro’s “Nightmare Alley” with cunning embrace and subversion of the film noir archetype.
If “Nightmare Alley” is del Toro’s lushly composed love letter to noir, the movie’s pulpy heart is in Blanchett’s conniving psychiatrist Lilith Ritter. She doesn’t enter the film until halfway through, when Bradley Cooper’s carnival huckster, Stan, catches her eye in his nightclub mind-reading act, and the two begin scheming together. But when she does turn up, Blanchett shifts the film’s fable-like frequency, conjuring deeper shades of mystery from the movie’s rich tapestry of shadow and fate.
In period films like “Carol,” “The Good German” and “The Aviator,” Blanchett has often evoked a classical kind of mid-century movie stardom. But in “Nightmare Alley,” an adaptation of the ’40s novel first made into Edmund Golding’s 1947 film, Blanchett slides into one of the movies’ most iconic types by trading less on her character’s seductiveness than on her razorsharp intellect.
“What I thought was timely and dangerous about this story was it’s an exploration of the truth,” Blanchett said. “Playing such a deliberately mysterious and ambiguous character I found really challenging because you have to know there’s a lot going on, but you’re never invited into exactly what she’s thinking.”
It’s one of two roles right now for Blanchett that revolve centrally
around American deception and disinformation. There’s “Nightmare Alley,” in theaters, and Adam McKay’s “Don’t Look Up,” on Netflix, in which she plays a TV morning news anchor who cheerfully steers the news away from an impending asteroid doomsday and toward lighter subjects — like the sex appeal of Leonardo DiCaprio’s scientist.
There may be something timeless about Blanchett in “Nightmare Alley,” but to her, both films are characterized by their timeliness.
“It was such a privilege to be on a film set in this particular point in human history,” Blanchett says. “One should always be alive to the time in which what you’re making is going to be viewed. I never felt that more profoundly than making these two films.”
To Blanchett, the term femme fatale suggests a diabolical woman — “like
a siren seeking to draw the male character onto the rocks to destroy them for no reason apart from they have diabolical urges.”
Blanchett and Del Toro instead played with subtle gradations in Lilith’s motives.
“Even though there’s nothing explicit that Lilith says about her background, there’s a sense that she’s damaged goods from the system, that she wants to burn down and she’s going to use Stan to do it,” says Blanchett. “Her faith in him and the men who run the system is nonexistent.”
Jan. 3 birthdays: Actor Dabney Coleman is 90. Singer Stephen Stills is 77. Bassist John Paul Jones is 76. Actor Victoria Principal is 72. Actor Jason Marsden is 47. Actor Danica McKellar is 47. Actor Nicholas Gonzalez is 46. Singer Kimberley Locke is 44. Actor Nicole Beharie is 37. Actor Florence Pugh is 26.