Creepy-cool performance by Gyllenhaal nails America's TV gore-hunger and job desperation

Rating: 9/10 (30 October 2014)

Writer-producer Dan Gilroy's directorial debut Nightcrawler is a smooth, brightly colored, compulsively watchable movie that plays with journalism, employment desperation, and the motivational online-educated loner world of a marginal news bottom-feeder in the mean streets and freeways of Los Angeles. He's Lou Bloom, a lonely Angeleno who's hungry, driven, and amoral. Jake Gyllenhaal becomes an intense character actor here, moving way beyond the obsessive crime investigator he played in Fincher's Zodiac. Taking the coyote as his metaphor, the actor dropped 25 pounds for the role and played his scenes grinning, bug-eyed, and always literally hungry. Though with need and ambition instead of poetry in his heart Lou might fit into the fringes of the Hollywood outcasts of Nathaniel West's Day of the Locust. Now, Gilroy hasn't penned a high literary work. This is a kind of sleazy thriller, but with a witty satirical edge and an implied strident message. It knows not the network of corruption we find in James Elroy, only carjackings, baby killings, and home invasions. At its center is a creep we love to watch, and in spite of ourselves almost sympathize with.
As we meet Lou, he's a scavenger (like a coyote), selling found or stolen copper wire and manhole covers to a wholesaler and delivering a comically detached, motor-mouthed job application that's instantly rejected: "I won't hire a f-ing thief!" But Lou happens on a bad car accident with a bloody victim and encounters the nocturnal world of free lance videographers who feed off accidents, selling lurid footage to the TV stations for the best price they can get. It looks perfect to him. He steals a fancy mountain bike and sells it to buy the tools of this game, police radio, camera, and starts chasing cop cars and ambulances He hires a desperate "intern" called Rick (Riz Ahmed) he hilariously "interviews" in a luncheonette using business-model lingo and agrees to pay a retainer of $30 a night to be his navigator and assistant, decoding police case designations, picking best routes. Suddenly, Lou is in his element. TV news at its most lurid "viewer discretion advised" level feeds off human misery just the way Lou does.
Importantly, Lou develops a purchase source, the aging woman director of the region's lowest-rated TV station, called Nina (Gilroy's actress wife Rene Russo), a kind of desperate poor relation of Faye Dunnaway in Network. She buys and sells fear to suburban white people. "The perfect story is a screaming woman with her throat cut running down a street in a good neighborhood," she says. Lou bargains intensely to raise his prices and status with Nina, and he clearly wants her as well as her patronage. Lou isn't clueless about people. He just doesn't like them. In fact he knows very well how to manipulate them. To speak of "chemistry" between Gyllenhaal, Russo, Ahmed, or Bill Paxton, who plays Joe Loder, a more experienced photo "nightcrawler" he follows, then climbs over, would be absurd. Lou exudes a kind of sweet, misleadingly innocuous-seeming poison, which doubles as creepy charm.
Lou has gotten into all this by breaking the law, and it's not long before he starts overstepping bounds even more dangerously. His eagerness to get to news sites before his competitors, like Joe Loder, who humiliate him for his clumsiness and poor equipment at first, soon leads to his getting himself and Rick to crime or accident scenes before the police do. And soon enough he winds up essentially involved in and covering up a crime in order to get a scoop. But skimming the margins of the permissible and the legal is all in the cause of local TV and the business model works, even though some of the workers don't survive.
Now there are several weaknesses in this movie. But they are not Lou's hilariously glib and clueless patter and the disarming manner in which Jake Gyllenhaal delivers it, nor the stunningly filmed speed chases in Lou's newly acquired red Mustang and the other dangers and excitements, nor the glowing day 35mm. film and night digital cinematography of multiple-award-winner and Paul Thomas Anderson regular Robert Elswit (Magnolia, There Will Be Blood). But the screenplay might have spread wider its picture of corruption beyond merely the camera hacks and the ratings-mad TV hacks who exploit them; the police are knights in shining armor here, so a whole dimension is missing. The movie further should not have been quite so continually caught up in Lou Bloom's own obsessions. It needed to step back and look at him from some cooler angles. Despite the more strident than necessary editorializing, and too intensely cynical, this isn't exactly fresh new ground that's being broken here. But it's still a creepily engaging, wonderful-to-look-at movie. If it's astonishingly polished and mature for a directorial debut, that's partly because of experienced family help. Dan has a twin brother, John, who's an editor, and another brother, Tony, who's a writer and director, and they were both on hand to help. Gyllenhaal, who co-produced, evidently contributed substantially to the spirit of the enterprise. And he delivers an amazing performance, as do Rene Russo and the rising British star Riz Ahmed.
Nightcrawler, 117 mins., debuted at Toronto. Watched for this review at The Academy Theater at Lighthouse International, NYC at the courtesy of Academy member Marilyn Stewart, 29 October 2014. US theatrical release date is 31 October 2014