a neo-noir on the surface - underneath, it's about... America, and Capitalism

Rating: 9/10 (13 November 2014)

Let's start with Jake Gyllenhaal here. In a way, his performance can be criticized in the sense that it's one-dimensional. In almost every scene of the film (when he's not putting on a big, s***-eating grin, or yelling at a mirror), he comes wide-eyed, talking a SUPER game, and that game is how to get an opportunity and run with it, how to make the big deal. He has the same determined, crazed but leaning-on-'nice' fervor. And yet it's an actor giving it his all and it works. He finds the... is 'humanity' the word?
He's not even really a person, is he - he's less like your common garden variety sociopath. He's relentless, he tries on emotions for what he needs, and can barely sleep. If the movie suddenly revealed itself as an alien or a serial killer, you might believe it. And there's never a moment where Lou Bloom doesn't show that. Gyllenhaal, with his gaunt (he lost weight) appearance, his stream-lined word-a-second performance, is on fire here. He makes this guy completely terrifying, yet recognizable at times, too. Could we see this guy in our everyday life? Or maybe leading a self-help/money-managing seminar?
One of the wonderful things about Nightcrawler is how it appears as one thing, but it's about something else, or on top of it. When I mention that he's a sociopath, that's putting it lightly. He may talk in platitudes, in ways that, if you met this person in person you might wonder 'Is this for real? Is this guy just totally nuts?' But it's a metaphor - what would happen if the American Dream, the Horatio Alger situation, went completely to pot? We were told by the Supreme Court in America a few years back, in a matter of speaking, that a Corporation is a person, and that a Corporation should have the rights that any person has in the American process.
What Gilroy is trying out here (perhaps akin to a documentary from years back called The Corporation): what happens when a person IS a corporation, that they are always climbing the ladder, always finding the way to make a deal, to make a profit, to get up to the Next Level (in caps)? Everything is seen as status, and damn it all if Lou is going to see his profit margin go down, or a loss to happen, whether it's with his news footage that he's selling to the local station, or if he spots a security guard with his "fake" uniform. And, more to the point, when other, actual corporations (like, say, a news network) face such a being.
Nightcrawler has a main character as a villain - or, as I've called it (ala Walter White) an anti-villain. He's diabolical, you don't like this guy, he actually may make you sick to your stomach. But he's the "hero" still. And like a sort of "arch" villain he's got all his information together on so many things - thanks, Internet - and other people around him, like Rene Russo's news director, or his assistant, who is desperate and has to take this man with his slick-back hair at his word. Indeed the scenes with Russo, for me, almost verge on becoming incredulous; how much will she, who seems to be a more sane person, can take with this guy? But he throws his challenges at her, there's rebuffs, and... she needs him.
Gilroy's script is sharp and intense, finding a strong plot to hang it on (it's still a neo-noir ultimately, with crimes on going on at LA at night, shot with a strong eye by Robert Elswit), and yet, for me, it works best as a character study. By the very end it almost becomes TOO much. Can we believe this? Maybe it's the point - he's gone to this point because... he can. Or people let him, or don't catch him, or whatever. There are holes you can try to find here. It's not about that. Like Gone Girl, it's a satire that looks at media with the sickening perspective it possibly deserves. It's a movie that challenges the viewer to go where this character does, to squirm, to recognize what is in this person as being something in the real world.
Nightcrawler takes a risk to show this character - a cross perhaps between Daniel Plainview and Rupert Pupkin - and explore what happens when Capitalistic ambitions (and on a more we've-seen-this-before level 'if it bleeds it leads' critical pieces) go to/past their limits. It's incisive, it's stimulating, and self-conscious. 9.5/10