Year Late Review: Nightcrawler

Combining elements of Film Noir and Dark Comedy, Dan Gilroy’s directorial debut Nightcrawler approaches the subject of the invasiveness of media from the perspective of a sociopathic freelance journalist. The film’s main character Louis Bloom, played with a lizard-like coldness by Jake Gyllenhal, is a man without a profession as the film begins. He lives an isolated life in Los Angeles (the traditional setting for Film Noir) and pursues even the barest hint of job opportunity with complete a-moral gusto. Which as we see early in the film does not put him above killing for little to no reason.

The premise of Nightcrawler is chilling and feels true to a culture obsessed with quickly delivered and slickly packaged info-tainment. Bloom becomes a “stringer,” a lone operator with a police scanner and a camera who shoots scenes of accidents and tragedies and sells the footage to news outlets. He strikes up a relationship with the overnight producer of the lowest rated station in town. The producer, Renee Russo pushes this noir further into the realm of dark comedy, as she opportunistically uses people’s bestial nature to sell her newscast, playing on their fears and manipulating them into cynical hysteria.

The film establishes a creepy tone and Gyllenhal is haunting as Bloom. But unfortunately the least effective moments of the movie are also the longest. When Gyllenhal is slithering through crime scenes or smiling insouciantly to the people he is manipulating he is utterly horrifying. But when the camera rests on him in over the shoulder framing as he talks and talks and talks his menace becomes farcical and the mysteries upon which his character is built (where is he from, why is he the way he is, what will he do next?) just begin to seem like holes in the writing. A character with that much to say should either be revealing himself through his words or through his evasions. When Gyllenhal’s Bloom speaks at length it just sounds like the screenwriter speaking directly to us with the character reduced to a thin pretense.

                      

There also comes a point, late in the film, where the opportunistic producer spills over into caricature. She ceases to make decisions out of her character’s motivations and seems to be acting merely at the behest of a script that isn’t finished being provocative. Still, Nightcrawler delivers often enough as a noirish takedown of current media attitudes and as a dark comedy where humankind’s greed and insatiable voyeurism facilitates the existence of people like Louis Bloom.