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Review of Nightmare Alley (Nathan Johnson)
FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:
Buy it... if you can immerse yourself in an extremely deliberate,
sparse, and intimate series of dissonant manipulations of one central
theme.
Avoid it... if you expect this score to offer mystery, allure, or any engaging noir feeling whatsoever, Nathan Johnson's approach yielding little more than dissatisfaction and boredom.
FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:
Nightmare Alley: (Nathan Johnson) Rather than look
to the 1947 Tyrone Power film noir adaptation of the "Nightmare Alley"
story by William Lindsay Gresham, writer and director Guillermo del Toro
sought a new look at the original novel in 2021. It's a tale known for
examining the grime and glamour of 1940s carnival culture, its hustlers,
its extremely shady women, and the beauty of the setting at war with the
shameless grifting of its shadowy characters. The lead of Nightmare
Alley is Stan Carlisle, whose rise through the carnival scene is
built upon his knack for wordplay and psychic manipulation. His talent
unites with crooked psychologist Lilith Ritter to swindle a wealthy man
of his fortune, and all goes to hell from there. Ultimately, it's a
story of the rise and fall of a risk-taker, his total defeat exhibiting
the due results of his criminal and moral depravity. It's the type of
film that beckons with its sly acting performances and glitzy art
direction, del Toro's involvement hinting at possible supernatural
elements when in fact there are none. The pandemic of 2020 left the film
half-finished for a year, and by the time production resumed, del Toro's
returning collaborator for the film's score, Alexandre Desplat, had
moved on. Fresh from his unexpected success for the mystery Knives
Out, composer Nathan Johnson was hired to rush through the process
of spotting, writing, and recording a score for Nightmare Alley
in just four weeks. His unconventional style of writing is a decent
match for the topic, and to bring his off-kilter ideas to life, he
utilized a 65-piece orchestra and only one specialty instrument: an
oversized air-conditioning grate rubbed to sound like a guiro gourd.
Johnson confesses to being inspired by the performances of the
principals in the film, and for their duplicitous characters, he
approached the score with an intentional battle between alluring
elegance and disruptive dissonance in mind. The ambience of the work is
quite stark and deliberate, Johnson moving slowly and without much
volume for most of it. There is a considerable amount of dissonance in
Nightmare Alley by design, the composer frequently breaking
chords or providing elegant lines of action in challenging discord with
each other. After all, the setting of the story is gorgeous, but the
characters themselves have no simple motivations, so the inaccessibility
of the resulting work is fairly understandable. Even so, that doesn't
make the score any measure of enjoyable.
The music for Nightmare Alley tests your nerves with malicious intent, but not obviously. It rarely overwhelms with noise or strikes an overtly obnoxious tone. Instead, it insipidly grates at you with quiet, sparse tones of unpleasant personality for lengthy periods of time. Tempos are extremely slow throughout, Johnson in no hurry to develop the narrative of his music; rather, the score's effective approach is to provide a diluted and disturbed sense of noir through its small scope and intimate instrumental placements. The piano is key here, bookending the journey of Stan's theme (and the score as a whole) and often returning to a single, repeating note for the character that doubles as a tool of anticipation. As Stan adopts his different personas, Johnson responds by expanding upon the thematic material that grows out of this piano, and he typically applies an oboe along the way to represent the women in his life. His structural intent was to create a theme for Stan and manipulate most of the other characters' themes as variations on that same set of progressions. That notion is fine, though the execution is so muted that it may not function well for most listeners. The formal statements of Stan's theme may not be distinguishable from the variants for some, and the meandering lack of clarity, while being the point, dilutes the score's narrative. That main theme could be defined as "dissonant elegance," guided by its main four-note phrase and generally descending nature. It debuts on solo piano at 0:38 into "Man or Beast" and receives sparse orchestration in incongruent layers at 1:31. Its descending chords inform the first half of "Storm's a Comin'" and erupt at 1:50 with a massive brass performance offering a greater dose of tonality over percussive rhythms. Fragmented on piano at outset of "Zeena's Spook Show," Stan's theme also opens "Stan Takes the Hook," is subverted a bit by early in "Reading Mrs. Kimball," stews in pieces in "The Take," and regroups in "Lie Detector" against the Lilith theme, against which it will battle significantly in later cues. The theme is tentative on oboe early in "The Poison Apple," consolidating at 1:37 on trumpet in that cue, and struggles early in "Grindle's Ghost" before its opening two notes repeat in a climactic crescendo in the middle of that cue. Regaining its form, Stan's theme becomes massive at 4:19 into "Lilith's Revenge," continuing with anger on brass throughout cue but eventually reduced to solo piano at end, tinged with the Lilith theme in defeat. An interesting interlude for this theme on oboe at 1:57 into "Man or Beast," somewhat like Molly's theme, never has a later impact. The variations on Stan's theme in Nightmare Alley all tend to bleed together, but they offer some interesting moments in the score's earlier passages. Pieces of the idea, mainly its descending phrasing, inform the second half of "Zeena's Spook Show" and generate somber but almost hopeful variants in "The Face of God" and "Open Graves." The composer presents militaristic alterations early in "Shoeflies" and a more swaying, romantic, ascending formation in "Copa Spook Show." In the end, though, Stan's theme has less appeal than those for the leading ladies. Molly's theme is not a forceful presence in Nightmare Alley, understandably, seemingly teased late in "Shoeflies" but finally congealing in the middle of "Molly's Theme." It's reprised briefly for oboe and flute in "Molly, Are You Alright?," attempts to survive in fragments in the first half of "Lie Detector," and exits at 1:02 into "The Poison Apple" with conclusive sadness. By comparison, Lilith's theme comes to dominate the latter half of the score. It's yet another variation on the descending Stan theme phrasing but with more focus and allure, not to mention a harder finish. Its prevalence begins to emerge in "Stan Takes the Hook," developing at 0:09 into "Lilith's Room" on oboe and deeper piano, and its descending phrasing takes over from Stan's theme in "Reading Mrs. Kimball." It ominously stalks late in "The Take," torments Stan's theme in the middle of "Lie Detector," gaining strength late in the cue, and threatens early in "Time You Delivered" on low strings. By "Grindle's Ghost," Lilith's theme completely subverts Stan's, becoming forceful in the latter half of the cue, with chopping strings and snare in lead. By 0:48 and 3:00 into "Lilith's Revenge," you hear full-ensemble usurping of Stan's theme with no remorse. The interplay between the Stan and Lilith ideas ultimately remains too elusive to really function well, however, leaving the tone of Johnson's renderings to carry these portions. And they do, to an extent. But not much of Nightmare Alley will be of interest to casual listeners, most cues really struggling to offer the structural intelligence in any accessible or even often discernable fashion. The score only engages in three cues, "Storm's a Comin'," "Grindle's Ghost," and "Lilith's Revenge," and it is no coincidence that these moments present the themes with the boldest brass. The ambience of the score is neither mysterious nor alluring, failing to establish any noir feeling whatsoever. It is intellectually intriguing but surprisingly boring, a massively missed opportunity for a fiendishly devious score to thrive with the setting and these characters. The hour-long album is capped by a solo piano version of Stan's theme, by which point you'll be long tuned out. **
TRACK LISTINGS:
Total Time: 63:11
NOTES & QUOTES:
There exists no official packaging for this album.
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