Nightcrawler

Screenwriter Dan Gilroy (Freejack, Two for the Money, The Bourne Legacy) makes his directorial debut with Nightcrawler, a psychological thriller about a misanthropic young man named Lou Bloom driven by an insatiable desire for success. Jake Gyllenhaal, who has specialized in playing eccentric, mentally “touched” characters since his first lead role in Donnie Darko, plays Bloom as a cross between Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle and American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman. When we meet Bloom he’s searching for a career that’s ideally suited to what he might call his specific talents and skills (and what we might call personality defects). His combination of manipulative charisma, lack of human emotion, and single-minded focus on results leads him into the competitive, adrenaline-pumping, nocturnal milieu of freelance crime journalism. Rene Russo (In the Line of Fire, Outbreak, Tin Cup) plays the news director at a low-rated Los Angeles TV station; she works the vampire shift, as she calls it, and develops a codependent professional and personal relationship with Bloom. Together, they push the limits of what is ethically permissible in the field of “if it bleeds, it leads” news-gathering.

It's clear that Gilroy aspired to make Nightcrawler a smart, provocative thriller with some incisive social commentary, but the finished film is contrived and simpleminded. Like his brother Tony (writer/director of Michael Clayton and Duplicity), Dan Gilroy writes the kind of flashy dialogue that actors love to sink their teeth into, and probably looks great on paper, but none of the lines sound like anything a real person would ever say. The painfully unsubtle film waves its themes and subtext in our face, never trusting the audience to discover any insights on our own. 

Nightcrawler criticizes the ways in which the news media prey on public fears and sensationalize crime and violence to score high ratings. Gilroy doesn't seem to realize that his own film is just as false and exploitative. In one sequence we see how excited Bloom gets while rearranging a body in a crime scene in order to obtain better footage. The irony is apparently lost on Gilroy that he’s doing the same thing. His film doesn’t expose a hidden truth about society; it presents an entirely composed artifice. Only in movies do people take the extreme actions and speak the on-the-nose platitudes that the characters of Nightcrawler engage in on a nightly basis. Any film that needs to exaggerate the truth of it’s subject to the extent that this movie does has little relevant commentary to offer a serious viewer. If Nightcrawler were a broad, comedic social satire about the extremes of TV journalism then these inflated scenarios might work fine, but this is a straightforward thriller meant to expose reality through perceptive drama. 

Gyllenhaal is a terrific actor who makes bold, surprising choices, but I’m beginning to discover that a little of him goes a long way. When he’s the second lead in a film, like Brokeback Mountain, Zodiac, or Prisoners, he's extraordinarily captivating. But when he’s carrying a movie and featured in nearly every scene, you catch him performing; the actor’s calculations behind each of the character’s mannerisms become apparent. This is especially problematic in the case of Nightcrawler because the script is so patently clever and writerly. Just as it's impossible not to hear Gilroy's fingers hitting the keyboard whenever a character speaks, we can see (and not look past) Gyllenhaal preparing for the role every time he twitches, cocks his head, or gives a blank stare with his bugged out eyes.