A stunningly original ride through the LA night with a career-making performance by Jake Gyllenhaal, “Nightcrawler’s” greatness is even more intriguing given the fact that it was pulled off by a first-time director.
Dan Gilroy, known best as the screenwriter of “Two for the Money,” “Reel Steel,” and “The Bourne Legacy,” finally threw down the gauntlet with his “Nightcrawler” script, taking on the role of director in order to see his vision for the story through to the end rather than relinquish control over the final product. “Nightcrawler” may just be Gilroy’s magnum opus. This is a bold oeuvre, as beautiful as it is bloody, which throttles forward at breakneck speed, never letting up until the credits roll.
Jake Gyllenhaal is unnervingly good as Lou Bloom, a young guy who conducts his work as a petty thief in the film’s opening scene with an air of wide-eyed innocence. When Lou earnestly implores the supervisor to whom he’s selling stolen wares for a job, confidently declaring, “Good things come to those who work their asses off,” you almost wish you had the power to give him a job yourself (despite him being a thief and all). Lou is clearly a guy with plenty of ambition, and nowhere to direct it. That all changes late one night when he happens upon a highway crash scene, pulling his car over to approach a mangled sedan as two rescue workers struggle to pull a young mother out of the driver’s seat before flames engulf the vehicle. Lou is entranced, but it’s neither the innocent victim nor the dramatic rescue upon which his gaze fixates–it’s the looming camera man (Bill Paxton), filming the scene like a fame-hungry paparazzo before tearing off to his nearby news van to cut the footage and sell it to the highest bidder. Suddenly, Lou has found his calling; after procuring a cheap camcorder and police radio, he sets out almost immediately to try his hand as a crime scene recorder. His equipment may be shabby, but Lou quickly proves that he has an expert eye and a knack for framing, and soon links up with the city’s lowest-rated local news station (helmed by a fantastic Rene Russo), which eagerly snatches up his gory footage to sell as shock TV.
Lou’s slick business savvy eventually lands him better gear as well as an endearing, slacker-type “intern” (beautifully underplayed by Riz Ahmed), whose desperate need for the job’s small stipend keeps him coming back each night. Lou is obsessed with growing his company, and he does just that. When Nina (Rene Russo) finally asks him where he attained such vast stores of knowledge about business, Lou calmly responds, “I’m on my computer all day.” That he is. Gilroy’s trick for creating such a compelling protagonist in Lou is that he gives us little to no backstory on the character aside from a brief reference to growing up in the Valley. In his free time, we only see Lou confined to his single apartment watching TV, ironing, gazing into the glow of his computer screen, and that is all. No trace of family, no friends–the closest thing Lou has to maintaining a relationship outside work is that with a plant he waters each day. Indeed, there’s something oddly American Psycho about the way Lou views the rest of humanity, the way he peers, unfazed, through the lens of his camera at bloodied victims of car crashes, robberies, and shootings. He is a professional, and they are a sale, nothing more. Nina’s breathless excitement each time Lou presents her with the previous night’s most grisly footage is an unsettling reminder of how desensitized our culture has become to this sort of gratuitous gore. As Don Henley once ominously sang, “It’s interesting when people die, give us dirty laundry.”
http://youtu.be/UPawRAHG-0g
Dan Gilroy has created a film that lingers in the consciousness, one with a brutally funny script, comedy of the darkest order brightened only by the brilliant neon lights of Los Angeles. “Nightcrawler” opens this Friday, October 31.
-Brigid Ronan
