Jake Gyllenhaal and director
Dan Gilroy at Venice Beach
NIGHTCRAWLER B-
USA (117 mi) 2014
‘Scope d: Dan Gilroy Official
site
If it bleeds, it leads. —Joe Loder (Bill Paxton)
Like Christian Bale in THE MACHINEST (2004), Jake Gyllenhaal
lost about 20 pounds for the role, never looking emaciated, but creating a significant
enough change that he simply looks odd and peculiar, creating one of the
creepier characters to inhabit the screen of late. While he’s no Travis Bickle from Taxi
Driver (1976), he does play a reclusive sociopath prowling the streets of
Los Angeles in the middle of the night.
Meet Lou Bloom (Gyllenhaal), always seen with a subtle facial tic to go
along with that persistent grin that supposedly sets others at ease, yet this
man is as uncomfortable in his skin as is humanly possible, where he slinks
around with the mannerisms of an extraterrestrial creature inhabiting an
earthly life form, almost always hiding some sinister purpose that he spends
his entire life hiding. With no
backstory whatsoever, we are introduced to this character as he breaks into a
chain-locked construction site salvaging what scrap iron he can find, cold
cocking an inquiring security guard and taking his watch after professing his
innocence, claiming the gate was open and he got lost. With this, we know we are dealing with
someone who has no problem crossing the moral boundaries, whose criminal
inclinations come natural, which he routinely covers up with lies. While negotiating a price for his stolen
wares, he asks for a job at the scrap yard, but the boss indicates he makes it
his policy not to hire thieves. While
driving home, he passes an accident site where emergency personnel are working
frantically to free a woman trapped in the wreckage of an auto collision, where
he discovers Joe (Bill Paxton), an amateur cameraman filming the entire scene,
claiming he sells his footage to local TV news shows. Trading a stolen bike for a cheap camcorder
and radio scanner, Lou invents a new career for himself overnight, scampering
to the sites of accidents, where arriving early offers him a foot up on the
competition.
Initially when he tries to sell some footage to a late night
news director with failing ratings, Nina (Rene Russo, the director’s wife), she
indicates she already has that footage, but Lou insists he was closer to the
bleeding victim, with a better angle, which suddenly draws her attention, where
she agrees to buy his material so long as he sells it exclusively to her
station. Her stated policy is exposing
crime only in the upscale neighborhoods that are not normally associated with
crime, which makes it a story, while feeding the public constant images of horrific
accidents, each one more gruesome than the last, as the public can never get
enough of this kind of carnage in their neighborhoods. While this is a distorted viewpoint that is
undeniably disturbing and unapologetically cynical, this kind of skewed vision
is what passes for journalism today, where stories are no longer developed by
beat reporters showing initiative and hard work, or drawn out by subsequent
follow-up interviews, as instead they cater to an audience with short attention
spans, becoming a business of providing ghastly images that the public devours
whole. His late night escapades lead to
a series of scoops, trading in his beat-up car for a racy fire-red Dodge
Charger with more sophisticated equipment, where the GPS is hooked up to his
police scanner through a computer touchscreen, creating instant directions to
wherever he wants to go. With this, he
hires the first person available to work for nothing, homeless intern, Rick
(Riz Ahmed), claiming this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to develop
skills that will further his career in the news business, helping to operate a
second camera while navigating the route.
Rick is just an ordinary average Joe, the kind of guy looking to make a
buck as he’s down on hard times, where eventually he’s promised $30 bucks a
night, where Lou continually promises him advancement within the company if he
does well.
This is a job that literally flirts with disaster, as Lou is
so over the edge that his deranged reality isn’t really close to that of
anybody else, where he’s willing to go light years beyond what would be
considered questionable moral judgment, where in one accident, arriving ahead
of the police, he actually moves the dead body for a more dramatic shot,
staging the footage much like the news programs stage the news. In Nina, he has the direct descendent of Faye
Dunaway’s manic ambition for ratings in Sidney Lumet’s Network
(1976), someone so desperate that she’s willing to deal with a bottom feeder
like Lou, looking the other way when it comes to ethics, as getting what she
wants in order to further her own career is all she cares about. Rivaling even Billy Wilder’s ACE IN THE HOLE
(1951) as the most cynical movie ever made, Lou is so hell-bent on getting his
footage on TV by any means necessary, while establishing a name for himself and
his business, which means taking creative license whenever the opportunity
presents itself. When he arrives at a
home invasion ahead of the police, he actually witnesses and films the burglars
coming out of the home, driving away in their van, complete with an image of
their license plate. But if that wasn’t
enough, he then enters the home with his camera leading, where there are
multiple casualties on the ground lying in a pool of their own blood, where he
literally canvases the entire house before making his getaway, all prior to
anyone else arriving on the scene. This
footage catches the attention of homicide detectives who would like to know how
he obtained such raw material shot at the scene of a crime before officers
arrived. While it’s, of course,
blatantly illegal, he falls within a gray area of the law by claiming he
intended to help or rescue any surviving victims. Curiously, one was still alive when he
arrived, something he carefully edited out of his footage (which is demanded by
the police), but he was dead by the time others arrived. Lou skillfully manipulates his way around the
police, who see right through his shoddy story, but they have no countering
evidence to arrest him. Taking the law
into his own hands, Lou withholds the information about seeing the killers and
instead orchestrates the arrest in a public place where he will have the
exclusive footage of what transpires.
While this is a nightmarish vision of a gloomy and hopeless world, deluded
beyond recognition, it’s not without heavy doses of dark humor, where the bleak
and exaggerated style by Dan Gilroy (brother to Tony, writer of three of the Bourne series, director of one) invites
its own criticism for simply being too preposterous, veering into the SIN CITY
(2005) neo-noir moral void of underground comic books.
