Jake Gyllenhaal is on some kind of a role and if it hadn’t been for a couple of relative failures in 2010 we may have never seen this Jake Gyllenhaal. Outside of Source Code, 2010 looked like it would be nothing but big budget studio features and Oscar bait in the actor’s future as Prince of Persia and Love & Other Drugs hit theaters. Sure, before that he had Zodiac and Brokeback Mountain, but it’s in the last few years that he’s delivered fantastic performances in some of the best films of his career, those being End of Watch, Prisoners, Enemy and now Nightcrawler. He shines in films that are anything but the norm and Nightcrawler is his most outlandish yet.
Starring as Lou Bloom, Gyllenhaal taps into a character that isn’t easy to define, though after stealing chain link fence, copper wire, a couple manhole covers and other such items, he sells them to a construction site foreman and afterward is ready with his resume and sales pitch, asking for a job. “I don’t fucking hire thieves!” the man says to him, to which Lou laughs. He gets it. It’s the kind of response Lou understands and probably would have said himself, that’s the kind of guy he is. He may be down on his luck, antisocial and, in the end, a raging sociopath, but he’s also one hell of a smart and driven man. Add those things up and the result is scary, especially once Lou seems to find his calling in freelance videography, tracking down crime scenes in the dead of night and capturing all the gory details on camera.
Writer/director Dan Gilroy uses Lou to create a narrative driven by the old saying in network news, “if it bleeds, it leads”, and TV news producer Nina (Rene Russo) is quite specific when describing for Lou the kind of content she wants: “Think of our newscast as a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut.” Yeah, there’s no sugar-coating here as Nina isn’t afraid to ask (and pay) for what we’ll get her the ratings and Lou isn’t afraid to get it for her, but the deeper he gets into nightcrawling, the further he’ll go for the shot and we’re talking about going well beyond putting the camera in the face of bleeding victims. It’s the moments Lou arrives at a crime scene before the cops that things really start to get dirty.
Gyllenhaal brings Lou to life in a most impressive way. Manic and disturbed, yet never seen in public out of control. He slithers through crime scenes like a snake, sifting his way through the blood and carnage, lingering on corpses and soon using questionable ethics, becoming just as much a part of the crime as he is the “journalist” capturing it.
Accompanying Lou is Rick (Riz Ahmed), a homeless young man he takes advantage of for $30 a day. Ahmed is something of a moral compass, though never entirely unwilling to participate. Rene Russo inhabits every negative quality you could imagine when it comes to a local news producer and she’s at the top of her game.
Nightcrawler is fascinating in that it says as much about local television news organizations and their scare tactics reporting as it does the current economic environment, forcing people in Lou’s position to think outside the box as employment opportunities dry up. It’s darkly satirical, frequently funny in a morally disturbed kind of way and edited with precision by Gilroy’s brother, John Gilroy, bringing serious thrills in the film’s third act.
It probably goes without saying the lensing from cinematographer Robert Elswit is spot on. Given the fevered, fast paced nature of the film and its editing, Elswit’s camera is fluid and captures some amazing images in the shadows of nighttime Los Angeles. It’s no wonder Lou Bloom’s camerawork is praised by Nina as he gets progressively better, he had a wonderful cinematographer guiding the camera behind the scenes, floating over the blood stains and capturing his image against massive flames in the background.
My complaints are few, but they do knock this film down a notch as I couldn’t help but get a little tired of Bloom’s ways in the second act, which tends to lag and feel a little repetitive. For as sharply edited as the film is, there are moments midway through that slowed things down, but thankfully the third act rectified that issue, limiting my complaints to a short amount of time.
How far would you be willing to go to be at the top of your profession? Could you hide in the bushes like the paparazzi taking snaps for TMZ? How much would you be willing to corrupt your moral code if it meant an extra $10,000 a month? Within Nightcrawler the stats for a standard half-hour of local news are broken down and “if it bleeds, it leads” isn’t a saying merely because it rhymes.
