A Hannibal-like performance by Gyllenhaal

Rating: 8/10 (14 November 2014)

Jake Gyllenhaal carries the movie. That much is clear. His performance is chilling, yet charming. It is apathetic, yet humorous. It is disheartening, yet inspiring. He masterfully coerces the audience into falling victim to the charm of a character who is by all accounts unlikable. It reminded me somewhat of Anthony Hopkins' iconic performance as Hannibal Lecter. Relax. This was not quite the transcendent perfection that Hopkins displayed as Hannibal, but the characters had a similar effect.
As the film opens, we find out just about everything that we need to know about Lou Bloom within the first five minutes. Lou is attempting to steal fencing and other metals to sell for scrap when he is caught by a security guard. The guard questions Lou, to which he retorts a number of lame lies. Upon spotting a sleek watch on the guard's wrist, Lou wrestles him to ground and flees with the watch and materials. He then attempts to sell the materials, negotiating skillfully and rattling off prices with expertise. After the sale is made, he attempts to finagle a job from the manager, who turns him down repeatedly. He then stumbles upon a graphic car accident, where he stares, sans any emotion. A man filming the scene informs Lou that he is a freelance nighttime news journalist (nightcrawler). From these opening events, we learned that Lou is sleazy, manipulative, ambitious, smart, and creepy.
The remainder of the film serves only to provide further evidence to support our original impressions of Lou, and it makes a strong case. He is a fascinating character, one with many idiosyncrasies, the most prescient of which is his obsession with control. He seeks control constantly. He spends much of his time reading about tactics of management, conflict, negotiation, and communication. He is able to recite passages from readings with machine-like accuracy and efficiency. In most cases, Lou is very successful in his attempts to manipulate and control, and when something does not fit his rigid expectations, he does not like it. So he makes changes. These changes are often illegal, immoral, and creepy. He does not like people, mostly because they are undependable, and they ruin the control for which he thirsts.
One person that he did like was a network station manager named Nina (Rene Russo). Initially, they get along well because he impresses her with his work as a nightcrawler. But then he inevitably tries to manipulate her while they are out at dinner. He makes a proposition that they begin a sexual relationship, which she firmly declines, making the scene awkward. The situation quickly turns droll when Lou seems oblivious to how uncomfortable he has just made Nina feel until she bluntly informs him. To alleviate the tension, he efficiently (his perspective) and rudely (everyone else's perspective) asks her to leave.
Just as he did dinner with Nina, Lou often had a peculiar style for handling people. He operated very much like a robot that had been programmed through countless hours of reading articles online about controlling human situations. Thanks to his lightning-quick learning ability and his accompanying encyclopedic knowledge, he was able to recite textbook-style monologues and quips, which were darkly humorous, unnerving and charming if not intimidating all at once. This style of speaking contained brutal honesty and consistently succinct speech used for clarity, which were amusing given their perfectly machine-like efficiency and lack of any semblance of social acceptability. Lou operated negotiations and manipulations like a genius, but totally flopped at establishing personal relationships because he was so emotionally off putting. He clearly struggled to understand others' emotions, yet he anticipated the thoughts of others very well. A subtle and fascinating distinction.
Lou's inability to understand the emotions of others is not at all surprising when we observe him constantly behave with complete apathy. He shows zero remorse for any of his sinister decisions, no matter how grave the outcomes. He manages to maintain a completely calm disposition throughout the entire film, aside from one scene that seemed out of place. In all other cases, Lou never lost his cool no matter how intense the circumstances were around him. The only emotions that he ever displayed seemed contrived, as if he was acting in that manner because he thought that people expected him to. Or perhaps it was all a part of his ever present manipulative tactics.
In the film's final sequence, there are no redeeming moments for Lou or for any character. Lou never improves or worsens as a person during the movie. The events simply reveal in more detail exactly what a kind of person like Lou is capable of. Apparently in a chaotic nighttime atmosphere in L.A., people like Lou can do just about anything.