OK, to be honest, I had no idea what to make of Nightcrawler when it came out. I probably would have gone to see it had I been going on a weekly basis when it came out, but I wasn’t so I didn’t, and as such, I held off on seeing it for the longest time. I knew it by reputation as a good movie, that Jake Gyllenhaal plays an unscrupulous news photographer, and the movie works as an indictment of local television news and the drive for sensationalism to get ratings.
Actually, now that I think about it, I knew more about this movie than I thought I did.
Louis “Lou” Bloom (Gyllenhaal) is an amoral lowlife looking for work. A chance encounter with freelance TV news photographer Joe Loder (Bill Paxton) inspires Lou to do the same. He gets himself a camera and a police scanner and sets out to get footage from crime scenes and the like that he can then sell to a local Los Angeles TV station. As it is, Lou does have a good eye for photography. He’s a quick study, and he soon has some footage that he can sell to a local station, the lowest rated one in town whose morning news director Nina (Rene Russo) is not particularly picky about what she airs as long as it could attract eyeballs. All she wants is “good” footage of sensational crimes and accidents that she can show to an early morning audience.
As it is, Lou’s basic disregard for anything regarding ethics means he will do what it takes to sell more footage. He’ll hire homeless man Rick (Riz Ahmed) as an unpaid intern to assist him, turn down offers to join Loder’s company, and use his ability to get footage to get basically anything and everything he wants from Nina. He’s not above interfering with a crime scene to get a good shot, and he is likewise not above visiting a crime scene before the cops get there. Quite frankly, Lou seems to be the type who will create news if he feels he has to. Will this catch up to him somehow?
Alright, kudos to Gyllenhaal: Lou is a completely repulsive person, and Gyllenhaal plays him that way the entire run time of the movie. He carries a soulless look in his eyes the entire time, speaking in a monotone that suggests he’s maybe not all that human. He treats everyone and everything the same, is completely comfortable telling whatever lies he needs to to get the money he wants, and just makes for a truly interesting (and awful) character that I can’t say I have seen in any movie before, or at least not recently. The closest I can think of may be Adam Sandler’s character in Uncut Gems, but he had a personality and some charm with a drive to gamble even to his own detriment. Lou is just a blank slate of a person driven to, well, make money? Take pictures? I can’t say.
Besides, this is a world and business where Lou’s methods are actually being rewarded by Nina and the local news station he sells all his footage to. The level of sensationalism present in TV news, especially at times local news, is clearly the target for writer/director Dan Gilroy here, but that in and of itself is an indictment of the home audience, the people who tune in to see the sort of footage Lou brings to the station. People are suffering, and only certain types of people, but there’s Lou with his camera and complete disregard for other people and their suffering. After all, if no one tuned in, the Lou Blooms of the world wouldn’t be in business. A movie like this manages to demonstrate that in all its uncomfortable ways, showing that maybe we don’t know any Lous, but they probably exist, and society seems to reward them for that.
Grade: B+
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