Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler is a kind of social vampire scenario. It deftly threads one sociopath’s blossoming into a social tapestry into which that character is particularly well suited. As much as the film is about Louis Bloom, it is also about how our present society justifies and rewards his anti-social behavior.
Small-time crook Louis Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal, who is superb) needs a job, and finds a career path when he sees “nightcrawlers” at work — the people who film accident scenes, police chases and the like for TV news. Louis gets himself a camcorder and slowly learns the ropes. Before very long he has an employee (Riz Ahmed) and is rivaling other outfits for the bigger stories. One particular murder story reveals Bloom’s true character while raising larger questions regarding how TV covers the news and what choices are morally or ethically acceptable.
This subject is not new (see the newspaper dramas of the 1930s like Five Star Final, or Don Henley’s song “Dirty Laundry”) but writer-director Dan Gilroy has found a fresh angle by focusing on an outsider who very quickly rises to prominence as a TV stringer. This would work well even if the main character were likable and heroic — but it works better with Bloom as an erudite, chatty, unforgiving professional with no compassion or empathy for anyone who gets in his way. He’s the kind of guy who smiles with his mouth but never with his eyes. And the scariest thing about him is, as the film posits, he’s just the type of guy who will succeed in our modern world.
Gyllenhaal is great, but Gilroy has also given a choice role to his wife, actress Rene Russo, as the TV news director who sees Bloom for who he really is, but cannot risk turning him away because he brings her the footage she needs. Russo has always been an underrated actress (she’s a knockout in The Thomas Crown Affair, 1999), and here she finally gets another role with which she can run. Yet this is Gyllenhaal’s show all the way, and Gilroy allows him to dominate the screen. There is always a tension beneath the facade, especially during the stakeout scenes just before the action that climaxes the story.
Nightcrawler is a terrific film, and a terrific debut film by Dan Gilroy (brother of Tony Gilroy, who made Michael Clayton). Having said that, I didn’t really enjoy this movie. It is creepy, and cold-hearted, and illustrates many things I find repulsive about modern America. It reminded me of a vampire film because of the manner in which Louis Bloom sucks out what he needs from a wounded society to survive and prosper, and he does prosper. But although I didn’t enjoy the film very much, I do recognize that it is very well made and is, in its cautionary way, an important movie. Effective cinematic artistry is sometimes disturbing or difficult to watch, but that doesn’t make it any less important. I do recommend it. ☆ ☆ ☆ 1/2. 6 November 2014.