An American Success Story

Rating: 7/10 (4 November 2014)

One morning Gregor Samsa woke up to find that he had been transformed into a giant cockroach. With his crazy eyes, skeletal features, scuttling movements, and natural affinity for the night, Lou Bloom has always been a giant cockroach – trying to pass for human by living according to the self-improvement and HR-speak clichés he's learned off the internet. He joins the pantheon of American movie crazies with Travis Bickle and Rupert Pupkin, but his crazy is different than theirs. Lou doesn't dream of violent catharsis or celebrity. He dreams of good, old fashioned American entrepreneurial success by finding an unmet need and doing whatever it takes to fill it. The better parallel is with Fincher's fictional version of Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network.
Lou is a genius at what he does, much less sophisticated than Zuckerberg but just as single minded and brilliant at his bottom feeding place on the food chain. He is uneducated, or rather self- educated, but he has plenty of native intelligence and a sharp analytical mind to go with his energy and determination. Having learned that the customer wants not reality but a certain image of reality, he sets out to provide that image by any means that come to hand. Because he's intelligent and analytical, he knows how to adjust reality to what the customer wants. Because he's inhumanly focused on the task at hand, he has no compunction about making the adjustments. And he's as talented a businessman as he is a technician. The high point of the movie is the scene where he shows the customer, an aged-out news chick who has become the night shift news director on the lowest rated station in LA, exactly how well he understands the market, his place in it, and hers too. Lou is a very fast learner indeed.
Nightcrawler's third act goes a bit too far over the top. Let's just say that someone in Lou's business needs the good will, or at least the acquiescence of the police in the long run, and he does something that should get him on the LAPD's permanent blacklist. At the very least, it seems to me, the cops would have gotten a warrant to search his hard drive, but he just walks with impunity. That's not credible. Everything else is far too credible