Nightcrawler, False Evidence Appearing Real (Abridged for IMDb)

Rating: 10/10 (9 August 2015)

Nightcrawler is like the Network (1976) of news footage. It brought me into a world I didn't even know I wanted a movie about. It shows just how easy it can be to sell a manipulated reality to the public to serve an agenda. Jake Gyllenhaal stars as Louis Bloom, nicknamed Lou, a man who has finally found his calling as a journalist of sorts, filming footage that he sells to the news each night. "I'm thinking", he says, "that television news might just be something I love as well as something I happen to be good at." Close to tears, he looks at a newsroom backdrop of the city at night. "On TV, it looks so real." He goes on to take that televised reality to many extremes throughout the film. Gyllenhaal's performance is a wonderful character study. How can Lou be so determined to film what he does at the cost of people's lives and his own human decency?
Riz Ahmed who plays his assistant Rick gives a really good, natural performance of a guy with clear motivations in their relationship. It starts out with Lou talking about skipping the "bad" neighborhoods while Rick himself is clearly a minority and he laughs along. He watches what he says and films things that turn his stomach. He puts up with some frightening glimpses of a darker side to Lou who always seems to be on the verge of actually doing something scary. Eventually, Lou's demands get to be too much and Rick needs more compensation to be okay with everything that's going on.
In the daytime, Lou stays home, archiving his work, watering his plant, watching his footage from the night before on the morning news like a husband watching their wife give birth. Always there alone, he never has friends over. There's nothing to indicate that he has any. "What if my problem wasn't that I don't understand people" he asks, "but that I don't like them?" Are all crime journalists as cold and reckless as Lou? Of course not. That's not the point. It's the kind of stories he exploits and twists with the help of the local news that is so rampant all around us.
In another movie, a character would make a decision that could later lead to trouble for them and we'd think "okay, how can they not see what's going to happen?" This movie is smarter. On a 911 call, Lou gives a very detailed description of two suspects whom he earlier told detectives he didn't get a look at, but, the reason he's doing it here, and why it works, is because of the tension and the importance of the situation he's in. It's not that what he's doing can't still be trouble for him in the future, it's that he has a real reason for doing it. He cannot afford to mess up the situation by having the cops confront the wrong people. He's orchestrating an explosion between the cops and criminals and he can't leave any loose ends. A great thing about his character is that he seems to figure out what his plan is just before we do and when we figure out where he's going with something, it's not because the movie gave him clunky expositional dialogue telling us what was going on. He tells the cops he sees a gun and we figure out ourselves how that's going to help him.
One night, at a dinner with Nina, the news director, Lou reminds her just exactly why somebody in her position, one bad rating away from unemployment, needs him. "I recently learned (that) most Americans watch local news to stay informed" he tells her. "I also learned that the average half-hour of Los Angeles television news packs all of its local government coverage into 22 seconds. Local crime stories, however, not only usually led the news, but filled 14 times the broadcast." Nina, played by Rene Russo as a news director who knows exactly what she needs to sell, knows his threat is one he can carry out, with ease. She knows what the viewers want to see and that Lou is the best at finding it. "We like crime" she tells him when they first meet. "Not all crime. A carjacking in Compton, for example, that isn't news, now is it? think of our newscast as a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut." He's a fast learner, like he says.
One minor detail which I don't mean to nitpick is the search engine he uses a few times for research. It looks pretty bad, like something out of the 90s. It would've been more immersive had they just cut to shots of the websites, which had all the information that the search results had anyway. I get that they didn't want to use Google but there were better ways to handle it.
It felt repetitive to have the same sequence happen twice with Rick wasting time messing up so the exact same guy could get to the scene first and taunt Lou, sirens already flashing, victims all gone. The repetition could've been more effective if it was cut down to just show that he was too late and it would still display the rivalry and get him in trouble later. Of course, such minor flaws were pretty much forgotten by the end of the film and didn't affect its overall power or quality.
"Do you know what fear stands for?" Lou asks. "False Evidence Appearing Real." Nightcrawler is definitely saying something about the way the media manipulates what we think is going on as well as what and who we should worry about, and how much. Throughout the film, I noticed a few ads, playing on the TV or the car radio in the background. Another way to sell something to the public.