Q: What do you get if you cross Anton Chigurh with Gordon Gekko?

Rating: 10/10 (7 December 2014)

A: Lou Bloom.
A devotee of capitalism in its purest, most honest- and therefore most amoral- form, Jake Gyllenhaal's detestable yet riveting character in Nightcrawler is very much a Gordon Gekko (See Wall Street, 1987) for this modern age of 24 hour sensationalist news coverage. To Lou as to Gordon, greed is good, and self-interest as a way of life is not one of many options but is in fact the only reality.
In many ways, he is an even more damning indictment of the worship of Mammon than Gekko ever was.
For as the Coens and Bardem did with Anton Chigurh, (See No Country for Old Men, 2007) in Lou Bloom, Director Dan Gilroy and Gyllenhaal succeed in making the character not merely grotesque, terrifying... and believable, but also in making him a nearly supernatural personification of something more intangible.
If Chigurh could be viewed as the heartless spirit of deterministic fate and our inevitable deaths, Bloom is the heartless spirit of our darker nature; our lust for petty monetary gain, pointless material items and useless power and dominance over other creatures. He is the personification of self-interest at the expense of all else; the personification of capitalism itself.
He also has disturbing hair and a sallow complexion, as Chigurh does. But I digress.
The movie is impeccably shot, paced, plotted and performed by all concerned. I find no flaw in it.
Take heed: each and every time you put your own baser interests before all else, you take another step- a step that cannot be retraced, no matter how small it is- on the road to becoming Lou Bloom; a soulless, worthless husk of a human being.
If this excellent movie has a message, that is surely it.