So we've got this big budget film with Bradley Cooper, Willem Dafoe, Cate Blanchett, and Ron Perlman in it and that is just to name a few of the stars, there are quite a few other great actors and actresses in this movie as well. It, on paper, sounds like it would be an amazing film and in some parts of it, it actually is. Unfortunately, it moves at a snail's pace and ultimately it took me 4 sittings to make it through the entire more than 2 hours of screentime.
For the sake of avoiding spoilers, especially the few twists that occur towards the end, I am going to be intentionally vague about what is going on in the story. I will say this though: It begins with Stan Carlisle (Cooper) who is a drifter looking for work that falls in with a carnival, first working simply as a person doing odd jobs wherever he is needed but due to the interest that he takes in the various acts at the carnival, he soon finds himself doing increasingly important part of the operation and the owners and operators take great interest in teaching him additional skills.
For once, the inevitable love story that seems to be a requirement of most Cooper films isn't just a side show and is actually a very important and necessary part of the story so we can't blame the extremely long runtime on this but we have to blame it on something and to me this "something" is the fact that about 50% of this movie could be eliminated and the same story could have been told. I can't understand how in 2021 a director would release a movie that is more than 2 hours long knowing what we know about the average person's attention span these days.
While parts of the movie were very visually appealing and I also can't point the finger at any particular actor and say that they were bad for their roles, ultimately they spend entirely too much time on character development especially when said characters end up not having a role of any major importance in the story. This is probably most notable with Willem Dafoe's character "Clem."
I have no proof of this, but feel as though this probably had a lot to do with Dafoe's star-power and his ego and the director was afraid to cut back on his lines and screen time even though in the end, his character is of relative unimportance to the overall story. In all actuality, they could have eliminated his character entirely and nothing about the story would change at all.
Should I watch it?
I suppose if you have a lot of patience the twists and especially the ending are very good but I don't know if this justifies sitting through what I consider to be at least an hour of unnecessary filler to get to it. I think the only reason why the studios allowed this is because of the fact that it is seen as though director Guillermo del Toro can do no wrong and has an Oscar to prove it. However, this did not resonate with audiences as the film ended up losing more than 20 million dollars at the box office and since there really isn't such a thing as DVD sales anymore, that's probably the end of the financial line as far as that is concerned.
I suppose if you have a ton of patience you might enjoy this film, but to me it is too artsy and waaaaay too long to get excited about.
