Nightcrawler (2014)
Four Stars out of Five
R
Louis Bloom: Jake Gyllenhaal
Joe Loder: Bill Paxton
Nina Romina: Rene Russo
Rick: Riz Ahmed
Writer/Director: Dan Gilroy
Music: James Newton Howard
Cinematography: Robert Elswit
So many people have commented on the role that televised
news broadcasts play in shaping American opinions that it seems almost
pointless to join the crowd. And yet, coming from the Left as I do, I cannot
watch Fox News for even ten minutes without becoming enraged. No doubt, many
from the right feel similarly with respect to MSNBC or other non-Fox aligned
stations. The media seems very much like a beast out of control as it twists or
even invents the truth in order to sell their commercial time-slots or worse, to
make a political point. One could be forgiven for wondering where the practice of
such blatant misrepresentation originates. Writer/director Dan Gilroy offers
some clues in his debut as director in “Nightcrawler”.
“Nightcrawler” tells the tale of a small time thief, Louis
Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal) that makes the transition to stringer for a local Los
Angles television news station. The irony of showing Louis’ origins as a petty
thief prior to him joining a news team’s effort seems to be quite intentional. The
movie opens by showing Louis in the act of stealing metal from a railroad yard
and then beating and taking a wristwatch from the security guard that catches
him in that yard. Louis takes his stolen metal to a junk yard to sell and to
seek employment. To underline how low in the social strata Louis lives and how
hypocritical a world he lives in, Louis is denied a job by the junk yard owner
because that paragon of morality would not hire a thief – no, he’ll buy stolen
goods from one, but he wouldn’t hire one.
Louis moves out into the night in his Toyota Tercel and first
observes a freeway car accident, and then a freelance photographer, Joe Loder
(Bill Paxton) filming the scene. Louis is inspired! He steals an expensive touring
bicycle and then trades it in at a pawn shop for a camcorder and police
scanner. Louis has also traded his life of crime for the morally ambiguous life
of feeding off the misery of others via his camera and the American TV viewer’s
lust for vicariously living through another’s moments of pain. Of course, Louis
needs a pimp for his filmed after effects of murders/home break-ins/car
accidents/bloody etc. after bloody etc. He finds one in Nina Romnia (Rene
Russo), the morning news director at KWLA. That Louis becomes successful at his
new trade should come as no surprise. What better training for the carefully framed
versions of the news than the life of a metal thief? Writer Dan Gilroy makes
both points abundantly clear as Louis trades up from the Tercel to a bright
red, seriously fast Dodge Challenger, and even has Louis comment on how he is
learning to better frame his shots; he makes the last point by having Louis
alter an accident scene by moving the dead body in a fatal accident to give him
that better camera angle.
Unsurprisingly, the movie is often painful to watch for its portrayal
of human indifference. Gyllenhaal’s performance of the sociopathic Louis is
stunning. After losing twenty pounds to play the role, and filming virtually
the entire film in the LA night, Louis’ pale and emaciated skin at times takes
on the aura of a vampire; again, the sense of a leech or bat feeding off the
blood of others. Gyllenhaal also adopts a stilted, nearly alien-sounding speech
pattern to again underline his very tangential relationship to the human race. Gyllenhaal’s
performance is far from that of his portrayal the gay cowboy Jack Twist in
Brokeback Mountain (2005). His role as Louis Bloom instead compares favorably and
is very reminiscent of Robert DeNiro as Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976).
Louis may not take a gun as Travis did to commit his mayhem, but Louis does
hold back evidence to prompt an explosion of violence in order to film it. He
makes Nina happy in doing so, and even gets her to go so far as to actually
play the role of hooker to his John in order to get even more of the film/drug
he is selling.
America in 2015 is awash with angry people. People who don’t
feel any longer that America stands for what they grew up believing it once
did: honesty, integrity, a sense of right and wrong that was impeachable. Is it
any wonder that people feel this way when TV news programs either continue to utilize
the motto “if it bleeds, it leads”, or perhaps have simply moved on to the role
of political hacks; saying whatever they think will advance their party’s
political position? What a choice to make, the prostitution of violence or
political pandering. Where does America’s soul reside in 2015? It certainly
does not reside within the corridors of America’s commercial news rooms. Was “Nightcrawler”
aimed directly at this point, at the hollow heart of news reporting as
practiced in the early 21st century or was it simply an exploration
of one man’s hollow heart in the form of Louis Bloom? Perhaps it was the
latter, but the analogy to a bigger, bleaker picture is there for all to see,
maybe even one, at which to despair.
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