NIGHTCRAWLER
DIRECTOR: Dan Gilroy
CAST: Jane Gyllenhaal, Bill Paxton, Rene Russo, Riz Ahmed, Marco Rodriguez
CLASSIFICATION: 13LV
RUNNING TIME: 117 minutes
RATING: ****
RATING: **
‘If it bleeds, it leads,” is the mantra of the LA TV networks whose news gathering practices are scrutinised in Dan Gilroy’s wonderfully creepy and ambiguous thriller Nightcrawler.
The station bosses want images of violent crime and car crashes to show on their bulletins, the gorier the better. Ratings soar whenever the victims are white and middle-class: the networks love it when “urban crime creeps into the suburbs”.
To feed the appetite of the TV news shows, a morbid industry has sprung up: night-crawling. Its practitioners are self-trained citizen journalists with video cameras and police scanners, looking for imagery of death and disfigurement that can be served up on the early morning shows.
Nightcrawler poses as a twisted version of the story about the all-American entrepreneur, trying to get ahead any way he can.
The man on the make is Lou Bloom (Gyllenhaal, pictured), a drifter and a killer. Lou has a wide-eyed, ingenuous charm about him that makes him appealing, however repulsive his behaviour becomes. He prowls around nighttime LA like a grim reaper with a video camera instead of a scythe, looking for extreme footage of human suffering to serve up to the breakfast audience. If he needs to re-arrange the bodies or choreograph the crimes, KWLA News isn’t going to complain too much.
Nightcrawler might be seen as the writer-director Gilroy’s barbed and despairing look at the debasement of journalistic ethics in the digital era. Then again, Lou has plenty of real-life ambulance-chasing antecedents from time past. Tabloid newspaper reporters from the 1930s and ’40s went to extreme lengths to get the scoop on executions and murders. The industry in which Lou flourishes has been there for a very long time. Lou is a chancer who makes being a peeping tom into a career.
Gilroy has a flair for staging action sequences. Nightcrawler is full of scenes of Lou and his driver/navigator Rick (Ahmed) racing down freeways to reach the site of the accident before their rivals. As viewers, we’re rooting for them. We become so caught up in the chase that we, like Lou, lose perspective on what he is actually doing. Lou has no feelings for the victims he films. Getting close-up footage of the mangled body of a car-crash victim is his equivalent of scoring a home run. His ethical lapses don’t bother his chief patron Nina (Russo), the producer so desperate for ratings she will buy his material without questioning how he came by it.
Lou is as hapless as a character in a silent, slapstick comedy. He is the underdog, hiding in the bushes, losing his bearings and risking being beaten up or killed by real criminals. His naivety is what makes him so suited to his job.
Gilroy plays up the rivalry between Lou and the more experienced nightcrawler Joe Loder (Paxton) in comic fashion – until it turns nasty. The humour is very uncomfortable. Lou is given to making jaw-dropping remarks that seem ironic or tongue in cheek – but are actually always in deadly earnest.
In his sweeter moments, Lou could pass for the kind of holy innocent played by Peter Sellers in Being There. Then, when he starts talking in pseudo-business jargon about his “career goals” and performance reviews for Rick, we realise the extent of his malevolence. He is a self-made man with a ferocious work ethic. With the internet at his disposal, he doesn’t need Dale Carnegie’s self-help book How to Make Friends and Influence People.
Nightcrawler is a slithery film on which it is hard to get a solid grip. It straddles genres, shifts perspectives and tones. Gyllenhaal is funny, engaging and sinister all at the same time. With a chameleon at its core, this film doesn’t engage us much on an emotional level. Gilroy’s observations about the hypocrisy of the media and the corruption of the American dream aren’t original. Even so, the film is entertaining and provocative – and it gives Gyllenhaal his best role since Brokeback Mountain. – The Independent
If you liked Zodiac or The Drop, you will like this.