Review: Nightcrawler
Los Angeles, the City of Angels, where beauty and rot are conjoined twins. Teeming with beautiful people, but also festering with hustlers and parasites willing to do anything to achieve their personal American dream. One such individual is Louis Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal), first seen attacking a security guard and stealing copper wire, a chain link fence and manhole covers, which he then sells off to a scrapyard owner.
Lou is no ordinary grifter, he's an ambitious lad set on establishing himself as an entrepreneur. "Good things come to those who work their asses off," he intones. He accidentally finds his calling as the titular nightcrawler, someone who films footage of accidents and other crimes and then sells it to local TV stations. Trading in a stolen bike for a camcorder and police scanner, Lou familiarises himself with the police codes and rushes to various crime scenes in the hopes of getting something sellable.
A self-admitted quick study, Lou knows that standing in the sidelines won't get him anywhere so he gets as close as he can to the action, even sneaking into people's houses to arrange family pictures next to bullet holes or, in a later scene, repositioning a corpse for a better composition. His Weegee-like efforts don't go unnoticed. Nina (Rene Russo), a local news director on the vampire shift of the city's lowest-rated station, is impressed by the footage he delivers and banks on the increasingly graphic film to boost the station's ratings and secure her job.
Nightcrawler sets itself up to be a satire / social commentary on the media's supply of titillating footage to feed the public's demand and the lines that are crossed to maintain this relationship. Writer-director Dan Gilroy asks the audience to be both seduced and repulsed by the extremes to which Lou will go, yet the film lacks the bite of actual indictment or even the sting of satire. Perhaps it is a sign of how inured we have become to amorality and violence that Nightcrawler feels so bloodless.
That said, there's no denying the thrills and chills that dominate the third act when Lou comes upon a grisly home invasion and captures the assailants on film as they make their getaway. He sells the the footage of the victims to Nina but withholds film of the attackers; he wants to control the story and see if he can create a situation that only he will be able to film. Certainly Gyllenhaal delivers an unsettling performance; his gaunt and bug-eyed Lou contains shades of his Donnie Darko as well as Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle and Rupert Pupkin.
One would do better to seek out Nightcrawler's cinematic predecessors Network, Medium Cool, The King of Comedy, Broadcast News, or Frank Capra's His Girl Friday and Meet John Doe - films that mined similar terrain to more resonant and devastating effect.
Nightcrawler
Directed by: Dan Gilroy
Written by: Dan Gilroy
Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Rene Russo, Bill Paxton, Riz Ahmed
