From the moment Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhall) pins a scrap-metal dealer to his chair with an unblinking stare and a sales pitch for his services as an assistant – an earnest, if garbled mission statement about self-motivation and teamwork – we know we’re in the presence of an American archetype which includes Tony Curtis’s Sidney Falco in SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS and Robert de Niro’s Rupert Pupkin in THE KING OF COMEDY: the loser driven and almost deranged in his quest to get on, no matter at what cost.
And Lou’s chance isn’t long in coming when he pauses in his night’s work of stealing metal fencing and manhole covers to witness a fatal car crash on a Los Angeles highway – and the TV news camera crew ducking around the emergency services to get the best and most graphic angles on the bloodied victims.
One stolen custom-made bike at Venice Beach later and Lou’s in the game, albeit amateurishly with a camcorder. LA’s morning news channels – their ratings battle as bitter as the rivalry between the ‘Nightcrawlers’ – lap up the footage, the more extreme the better: ‘Can we show this?’ asks producer Nina Romina (Rene Russo). TV executive: ‘Legally or morally?’ ‘Legally of course’, Nina snaps back.
As a satire on the news media, NIGHTCRAWLER goes at its subject full-tilt…
Zeroing in on her desperation, Lou feeds Nina ever gorier material, earning enough to upgrade his car and police radio equipment and take on an assistant (Riz Ahmed), whose starvation wages Lou excuses with more motivational harangues using jargon which we’re not surprised to learn he’s picked up on-line. By now, his moral compass swinging wildly, Lou is doctoring the news himself, shifting another car-crash corpse to a better camera angle, manufacturing a story by sabotaging a rival; and finally (and most dangerously) intercepting a lethal burglary, which leads to devastating consequences. Surely the law will catch up with Lou and deliver his well-earned comeuppance – won’t it?
As a satire on the news media, NIGHTCRAWLER goes at its subject full-tilt, as supercharged as Lou’s bright red Dodge Challenger. The story never lets up; nor does Lou, and repellent though his character is, it’s saved by a kind of appalled pity at his single-mindedness, perfectly and creepily realised by Gyllenhall. Also of help here, and sidestepping the temptation to preach, is writer/director Dan Gilroy’s skill in building tension, particularly during the latter stages. The whole film has a vibrant self-confidence, and it’s no surprise that it’s a family affair, being expertly edited by Gilroy’s twin brother John and produced by his other brother Tony, screenwriter of such polished and gripping narratives as MICHAEL CLAYTON, the BOURNE series and DOLORES CLAIBORNE. Rene Russo is also the director’s wife, and has been handed probably her best part since GET SHORTY: mesmerised by Lou, she reflects the audience’s resentment at being sucked into his poisonous orbit, and with it their complicity.
Los Angeles, here the ‘city of dreadful night’ is equally seductively shot by Robert Elswit, the film taking place almost entirely in the small hours or at dawn when the chorus is of squawking news channels competing to be the most gruesome. NIGHTCRAWLER is being called a modern version of Paddy Chayevsky’s NETWORK, which did occasionally lay its satire on with a trowel; but there are also echoes of John Herzfeld’s neglected 15 MINUTES (2001) in which two Eastern European gangsters in search of their brief moment of fame go on a homicidal rampage in New York, aided and abetted by a frenzied media.
‘What if my problem isn’t that I don’t understand people but that I don’t like them?’ says Lou in a rare non-jargon moment when challenged by his assistant. NIGHTCRAWLER certainly succeeds in making an antihero out of a sociopathic supernerd.
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