Nightcrawler

Some of my favorite movies are the ones that make you look at something you see everyday in a different way, and Nightcrawler is one such film.  I guarantee that if you see this, you won't watch the local news the same way again.  This movie reveals the world behind the smiling news anchors, and shows us a realistic depiction of just how they get that footage of accidents, local robberies, muggings and murders.

Just like me, you've probably never given much thought as to how they get that footage, and that's what makes the screenplay by writer-director Dan Gilroy so effective.  He takes something we see everyday on the news, and rips open the lid, showing us how that footage gets on the air.  Our entry into this world is Louis Bloom, who ranks as one of the truly great antiheroes of cinema.  Louis is creepy, disturbed, and hides his contempt for humanity with a false sense of kindness and good manners.  As played by Jake Gyllenhaal, Louis Bloom is one of the fascinatingly off-putting characters ever to appear on film.  Gyllenhaal supposedly lost a massive amount of weight for the role, and his skeletal, wide-eyed appearance makes the character all the more unnerving.  He doesn't just give a great performance here, but his physical appearance and mannerisms that he adapts adds to the character.

Louis starts the film off as a petty thief, swiping scrap metal and expensive bikes that he can trade in for cash.  While driving home one night, he comes upon a car accident scene, and is intrigued by a man who appears to be filming the accident with a video camera.  The man is Joe Loder (Bill Paxton), a professional "nightcrawler" who films these kind of accident and crime scenes, and sells them to the local news.  This intrigues Louis enough that he buys a cheap camera and a police scanner, and starts trying to get his own footage that he can sell.  After a few failed attempts, he finally is able to get some footage of a crime scene that is able to impress Nina Romina (Rene Russo, wife of writer-director Gilroy), the hard-nosed news director of a struggling morning news program.  The two strike up a close professional relationship, and as time passes, Louis not only becomes better at his job, but also starts to put aside his moral compass in order to get the best shot possible, even going so far as to, when he arrives at a car accident scene before the police, he moves the dead body of the driver so he can get a better shot of it.

This is not a moralizing film.  It never once questions the actions of its lead characters, even if some of the people around him grow increasingly uncomfortable as Louis is pulled further into his obsession of getting the perfect shot.  The chief person to speak against Louis' actions is, oddly enough, his partner.  That would be Rick (Riz Ahmed), a young man with no money or permanent address when the film starts.  He initially takes the job of guiding Louis to these crime scenes because he desperately needs the money.  But, he quickly realizes that his boss often values the job over his own safety.  Eventually, the police are involved, and Rick finds himself questioning what he's even doing.  The relationship between Louis and Rick is a complicated one.  Louis obviously has no real respect for his assistant, yet is able to manipulate him into helping him out further with promises of a raise.  He knows how to keep the people who work for him under his thumb with empty promises and false kindness.

Nightcrawler is a fascinating film, because it never once shies away from what Louis Bloom is really doing.  It forces us to watch his moralistic descent, and what's perhaps most shocking to the audience is that it is fascinating to watch.  Of course, the movie knows this.  It's built around the premise that we as a society are drawn to these kind of news stories.  We slow down when we see an accident, and we watch continuous 24 hour news coverage of the latest murder trial or police manhunt.  All this movie does is take us into the world that makes those kind of stories so compelling to most viewers, and how those kind of stories come to be.  The "nightcrawlers" who get the footage are not far removed from the paparazzi photographers who hound celebrities, only they follow police sirens.  There is a disconnect between the photographer and the subject.  This is to be expected, obviously, but it becomes downright chilling when Louis starts to set everything aside in order to get the perfect video set up or shot.

The movie is being advertised as a thriller, but it really is a character study as we follow Louis Bloom, and how he becomes obsessed with getting the perfect footage.  One of the many reasons I go to the movies is to see fascinating people, and he is one of the more fascinating I've come across in a film in a while.  His story truly is the American Dream, only much darker.  He starts with nothing, but becomes a self-made man, and works his way to the top of his field.  My only gripe is that I wish there was some more behind the scenes material about the news studio that he sells his videos to.  In one of the better scenes in the film, we see how Nina the news director edits and manipulates Louis' images, and then feeds words into an earpiece of the anchorman covering the story, making sure he sells the material with the right amount of fear and paranoia.  While fear mongering in the media is a well known subject, it's handled brilliantly here, and I would have liked to have seen more of it.

If anything, Nightcrawler makes us think twice about the images and information that the media is sending to us every day, and it really makes you stop and think about where some of the images come from.  This is an electric and truly alive film, one of the better ones of the year.  It might be unsettling for some viewers, but I also have a hunch that they will also be more excited by this film than they have been in a long time. 

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