Nightcrawler--Movie Review

by Peter J. O'Connell

 Nightcrawler. Released: Oct. 31, 2014. Running time: 117 mins. Rated: R for violence, including graphic images, and for language.

Nightcrawler was released on Halloween. It's a horror movie about a monster—but not the usual kind of horror/monster movie. The monster here is the media, and the horror is the nightmarish excess that an obsessive drive for success can produce.

Louis Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a Los Angeles scrap collector and petty thief whose conversation consists of cliches and jargon, of the type found at second-rate motivational seminars and courses on TV and the Internet, spoken in a machine-like manner, about how to succeed in business. By chance one night, Louis comes across a crash scene and observes “nightcrawlers” at work. These paparazzi seek not images of celebrities but ones of accidents, fires and crimes, which they sell to TV news outlets eager for the gruesome footage because it boosts their ratings. The operative principle is: “If it bleeds, it leads.”

Louis is excited by the “career prospects” offered by nightcrawling and is soon rushing to gory incident after gory incident in the neon-lit night, aggressively seeking the “best”--in effect, the bloodiest—shots. He even hires a hangdog, more-or-less homeless, young man (Riz Ahmed) to help him, and he finds an eager buyer for his footage in the sensation-seeking news director of a ratings challenged station (Rene Russo). After a while, to promote his prospects further, Louis sabotages his competition, manipulates the tragic scenes he is recording, and even creates tragedies himself.

Jake Gyllenhaal gives a superb performance as Louis. His appearance—gaunt and sallow, with angular face, dark eyes burning in sunken sockets, and slicked back hair with topknot—is almost skeletal, or demonic. His delivery of his lines is intense—sometimes obsequious, sometimes menacing—yet still almost robotic. Gyllenhaal's particular combination of appearance and delivery here should sear Louis Bloom into the memory of audiences as one of the most striking characters in film in years.

Nightcrawler's writer/director Dan Gilroy apparently had in his mind and memory some themes and characters from iconic films of Hollywood's last great period, that from the late '60s to the early '80s. Louis Bloom has a lot in common with Travis Bickle (Robert DeNiro) in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976). They both are loners who live by night, attempt inappropriate dates with an attractive woman, are obsessive, spawn violence. They each even have offbeat hairdos: Travis a mohawk, Louis a topknot. Each has a key scene in front of a mirror. And Sidney Lumet's Network (1976) dealt memorably with the media's willingness to race to the bottom. Nightcrawler, however, has no real equivalent of that famous outcry from Network: “I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it any longer.” It would seem that Gilroy wants us to ask: Is today's media-manipulated America even capable of such an outcry?