Nightcrawler

Director: Dan Gilroy
Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Rene Russo,
Length: 117 minutes
Country: USA

When we first meet Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal) he is cutting wire out of a fence, planning on selling it later. This is a man so desperate to make money that he is willing to do literally anything.  That night, when he witnesses a car crash, and the freelance ‘stringers’ filming it in order to sell it to the local news company, he finds his vocation. What I learned about the media wasn’t anything new, having seen it before in satires such as Network and Ace In the Hole, but Nightcrawler is still a highly enjoyable journey through the seedy L.A. underworld of video news-reporting, where “if it bleeds, it leads”.

What makes this film compelling is a career-best performance by Gyllenhaal, who, obviously going for the Oscar nomination, lost 20 pounds for the role, and exercised heavily in order to create Bloom’s bug-eyed look. He is one of those heavily-accomplished actors who knows how to throw his body weight around and use facial expressions in order to create meaning, making Bloom a uniquely weird character.  Bloom appears excessively nice, not in a genuine way, but in an OCD, passive-aggressive kind way, reminiscent of Robert De Niro in The King Of Comedy. Some of the funniest scenes come from Blooms inhuman way of relating to people, as he does not treat them with empathy but as business opportunities. He has this bizarre way of talking which seems to be a parody of empty business-speak in one scene using his parodic empty business-speech to convince a colleague to sleep with him. It is deeply disturbing yet disturbingly funny, and Gyllenhaal treads the line between the two perfectly. This is a perfect showcase for his acting talents, and seeing him here after Prisoners, I’d say he’s on the next level of his acting career.

He takes on homeless man Rick (Riz Ahmed) as his ‘intern’ and they traverse the streets at night, gorgeously light-up in that classic L.A Noir way by cinematographer Robert Elswitt (Magnolia, Boogie Nights). Lou Bloom works his way up the ranks as a nightcrawler, commanding better and better pay-checks, but soon finds that if you have the right “framing”, the ratings are higher, leading him to make some horrendous decisions that are both horrific and darkly comic.

The moral message here is that these types of shameless jobs only exist because this is what people want to see.

Nightcrawler makes you laugh despite of yourself, and has some thrilling moments that crackle with tension. One involves a Chinese Restaurant, which is suitably walled entirely by glass so we can see everything that goes on inside yet our perspective is from Bloom and Rick holding the cameras, making us view what happens as if we are watching it on TV. The effect is to make us complicit in what is happening, showing that this isn’t a mere satire, it has a didactic edge.

The moral message here is that these types of shameless jobs only exist because this is what people want to see. Rene Russo stars as Nina, the news programmer who distorts the truth and ignores the facts in order to spread fear into middle-class, white suburbia. She’s worried about ratings, and knows that this is the sort of thing that sells. It’s an old truism that no one cares about good news, and no one cares about bad news if it doesn’t affect them. That’s why right now Western people would rather get scared over Ebola and ISIS, or complain about Kim Kardashian’s behind rather than celebrate landing on a comet.

Nevertheless, the anarchic, amoral joy of the night-crawling scenes is threatened to be lost in some of the self-congratulatory, overly-didactic scenes in the news station, and at times the screenplay is a little on the nose. This obviousness is what holds back Nightcrawler from being great, as this would be more effective if it was presented with more subtlety. However, this film is worth seeing for Gyllenhaal alone. Nightcrawler shows a delightfully immoral character with a deft humour only Gyllenhaal could bring out.

Header Image Source: Entertainment One