Worth a look given Jake Gyllenhaal's mesmerizingly creepy performance and Gilroy's tightly rendered story

Rating: 7/10 (5 November 2014)

One of the trademarks of a smart film is that the audience doesn't know that it's being smart. Or at least they don't realize it at the time. Dan Gilroy's LA crime dramedy Nightcrawler isn't necessarily the "smartest" film of the year, but Jake Gyllenhaal's mesmerizingly creepy performance and Gilroy's tightly rendered story make succumbing to a convenient myopia about Nightcrawler an easy pitfall. That it is about an ambitious sociopath's descent into and subsequent rise through the reprehensibly bloodthirsty cesspool that is the nightly TV news industry is obvious from the trailer. But to the filmmaker's credit and the audience's benefit, Nightcrawler has a bit more than that going on beneath the surface.
Filmed across dozens of LA's shadiest street corners, the movie follows a young smooth talker named Lou Bloom (Gyllenhaal) as he discovers a passion for capturing local tragedies on camera and selling the footage to crime-obsessed TV news studios. At first, he's just one of a cadre of nocturnal freelance photographers looking to profit off of the city's nightly carjackings and homicides, but gradually Lou develops a knack for the job to the point where Nina, a local network's news boss (Renee Russo), starts crafting the daily broadcast around Lou's consistently shocking videos. With the specter of ratings season looming just a few weeks away, Nina's desperation grows and her dependence on Lou's material puts her in precarious positions. When Lou's competition finally catches up to him (embodied by a husky Bill Paxton) and his comparative advantage in being the first guy on the scene dwindles, Lou deems it necessary to create the stories on his own, both to realize his dream of growing a successful business and to maintain his chilling influence over Nina. Journalistic integrity and ethical questions get raised—although only by one of Nina's peers (played by Kevin Rahm)—and the cops suspect Lou has more information about an especially savage crime than the footage he sold to Nina. The story crescendos as Lou sets a plan in motion to capture his most astonishing—and dangerous—video yet that blurs the lines between documentarist and subject while revealing Lou's true colors in the process.
Nightcrawler's release this past weekend was aptly timed, what with the recent backlash against mainstream media's sensationalist fear mongering over cases of Ebola in the United States. To a lesser—but still relevant—extent, Nightcrawler's themes of privacy invasion and the bastardization of an individual's sense of self at their most vulnerable moment conjures the similarly complicated sentiments that tend to accompany celebrity nude photo hacking scandals. No matter where a shooting/structure fire/car crash occurs in the film, Lou Bloom's camera manages to find its way right in front of the victim's face like an ominous proboscis. He enters homes, films emergency surgeries and manipulates crime scenes before the cops arrive, all without the faintest sign of remorse. The resentment audiences will feel towards Lou and his behaviour is part of Gilroy's intent, and probably tells us something about his worldview regarding a currently developing culture of the anonymous public exploitation of other people's private lives, seemingly with impunity.
The manner in which Gilroy chose to tell his story is as compelling as the message he tried to convey. Sharp, deliberately manufactured dialogue highlights one of the year's stronger scripts that succeeds in both weaving a fascinating high-stakes narrative and piquing an unsettling interest in a character that resonates with the audience until the final shot of the film. Aside from a couple of alienating scenes that take you out of the movie, Nightcrawler preserves momentum even when we're just watching Gyllenhaal and his homeless employee (Riz Ahmed) monitor a police scanner in Lou's gas guzzler. No doubt, the film lives and dies on Gyllenhaal's portrayal of a recession- battered millennial poster boy looking for his calling in life. In interviews, Gyllenhaal has likened his character to a coyote, the unofficial SoCal mascot. The comparison comes through in the film, where Lou is scrappy, hungry, often unaccompanied, and a survivor (the actor's physical transformation into a slender sunken- eyed creep amplifies the metaphor). Scene after scene for nearly the movie's entire running time Gyllenhaal doesn't so much add depth to his character as much as methodically peel back the curtain to reveal what we already know to be true about the archetype he represents. Lou is self-interested, obsessive, lacking in empathy, and—above all—overtly charismatic. Most of his lines read like mantras pulled right out of Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, as if the self-educated loner had found it necessary to conduct extensive research on how to fit in with normal people (think if Patrick Bateman attended the University of Phoenix). It would appear Lou is so used to being alone that every interaction has degraded into a business relationship: people are assets to be used and negotiated with, while work, friendship, sex and everything in between have become points about which to be negotiated. When it's all said and done, Gyllenhaal's nightcrawler isn't all that different of a person from the enterprising novice we see in the very first frame. If anything, it's more likely that Gilroy and Gyllenhaal (who also co-produced the film) wanted to use Lou as a sort of stress test for evaluating the ratings driven TV news business where sensitivity, compassion and discretion are career limiting attributes. The film's core narrative then becomes how far a soulless alien like Lou can go without anyone stopping him or calling for reason.
For some, Lou will be too one-dimensional and lack the almost always unnecessary complexity audiences have come to expect from the typical cinematic sociopath. On the other hand, Gyllenhaal's subdued quasi-realistic depiction of an antisocial charmer with relatable motives is much more terrifying of a concept. No mommy issues, no master plans. Lou is just a morally flexible opportunist who happens to excel at exploiting the fear and suffering of others. The disturbing part is that he's finally found somewhere he fits in.