A good newsman is an amoral newsman in Dan Gilroy’s violently entertaining feature debut.
Jake Gyllenhaal is Louis, a thief, a liar, an American success story. Lou roams night-time LA. He’s a magpie, a neon-lit survivalist mugging and mauling his way across the city. He finds his calling when he happens upon a burning car and a badly injured woman. A freelance TV crew is attending the wreckage. They shove the camera into the bleeding woman’s face, tustle with the police as they drag her from the car. They get their footage. Then, as the ambulance pulls away, they celebrate the killing they’ll make selling their film to the morning news. Lou sees an opportunity. He pawns a stolen bike, buys a camera and starts profiting from tragedy as an ambulance-chasing freelancer.
From a subdued start Nightcrawler unfurls into a ghoulish and wickedly funny satire on journalism, the job market and self-help culture. Lou is a retro creation: a strange, real character lurking in a moral grey area. Gyllenhaal, slimmed down and bug-eyed, looks like Nosferatu, but has the manic vulnerability of Andy Kaufman. Lou’s like a Wes Anderson character who’s ambition has warped into a realm of violent sociopathy.
The news business of Nightcrawler is filthy. The local station editor (Rene Russo) wants stories that show urban crime creeping into the suburbs. “The perfect story is a screaming woman with her throat cut running down a street in a good neighbourhood,” she says. The network wants ratings, the public wants blood. Lou will happily get dirty, so he gets work. And he’s an artist. Why not drag a body from a car wreck so that the wounds shine in the headlights? It makes for a better shot.
The idea that Lou is not OK is drip-fed in. He hires an assistant (a nicely nervy performance from Riz Ahmed) and starts to twist him to his will. His drive is all-consuming, fuelled by cookie-cutter mantras from self-help books that he’s learned by heart. In his sick internal world, he’s made a rule system. He’s got a mantra for every immorality.
Nightcrawler may be murky, but its influences are in plain sight. Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead has been cut in there. As has elements of James L Brooks’s Broadcast News. Lou’s darkness, his blank, bleak determination could come from any horrible icon from Norman Bates to Keyser Söze, but Gyllenhaal’s performance is so dedicated, and Gilroy’s world so determinedly realised that it forces its way to originality.
“On TV it looks so real,” says Lou, as he stares at the backdrop of the LA skyline in the news studio. Back on the street he uses the same logic. The triple homicide in the home up in the hills isn’t three dead people, it’s a scene to be filmed.
Nightcrawler is a nasty, funny film. A tribute to the vile and a celebration of the dark.
