Film / Reviews
Nightcrawler
Nightcrawler (15)
USA 2014 117 mins Dir: Dan Gilroy Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Rene Russo, Riz Ahmed, Bill Paxton, Ann Cusack
Remember Stephen Tomkinson’s Damien Day in Drop the Dead Donkey? Globelink News’s ethically challenged star reporter was not above punching a small boy to get him to cry on camera or asking a despot’s firing squad for a second take. In one memorable episode, it was discovered that the child’s doll featured prominently in so many of his poignant news reports of massacres and natural disasters was, in fact, one that he carried with him to sex up his stories. Extract the comedy and make it darker – much darker – and you’re more or less in the milieu of the timely Nightcrawler.
Small-time LA hustler and petty thief Louis Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal) lacks formal education but is possessed of ample reserves of low cunning. You can almost hear his brain gears clanking as this amoral, ingratiating, bottom-feeding loner pulls up to the scene of a freeway crash and watches engrossed as camera-wielding ‘nightcrawlers’ record bloody footage to sell to local news networks. He’s soon joining in, amateurishly waving his crappy camcorder in cops’ faces. But ambitious Louis’s lack of moral scruples impresses hard-bitten Nina (Rene Russo), News Director of the city’s lowest-rated network. She explains patiently the modern refinement of the ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ mantra. What she really wants is footage of urban crime in suburban neighbourhoods, preferably with white, middle-class victims and ethnic minority perps.
Coming on like an amalgam of Yosser Hughes, Patrick Bateman and Rupert Pupkin, with the gaunt physique of Christian Bale in The Machinist (indeed, one could imagine the role being written for Bale), Jake Gyllenhaal’s bug-eyed sociopath is a magnificently grotesque creation, recycling trite management homilies from the internet while wallowing in the journalistic gutter. Kudos too to Rene Russo, who makes the most of one of those rare meaty roles for older women, her ruthless-yet-vulnerable Nina being locked together with Bloom in a macabre dance of co-dependent desperation. Brit Riz Ahmed (of Four Lions fame) is also on excellent form as Louis’s increasingly appalled but equally hungry ‘intern’, in a role that draws on his acting talents for once, rather than simply hinging on his ethnicity.
Juggling pitch black comedy with moments of genuinely palm-moistening tension, Dan Gilroy’s superbly shot, provocative directorial debut is quite simply the best film about TV news since Network.
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