Dan Gilroy (2014)

According to Dan Gilroy, the story he tells in this debut feature is based on the actual practices of certain television news channels.  If that were not the case, this would be an accomplished but tasteless thriller.  Assuming what Gilroy says is true, I think Nightcrawler, although unpleasant and rather narrow, is one of the strongest American films of the year so far and has the best original screenplay of any.  The main character is Louis (Lou) Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal), unemployed and a petty criminal, who is given a new lease of life by photographing death or, at the very least, horrific injuries – of victims of traffic accidents or violent crime in and around Los Angeles.  Late one evening, Lou discovers by chance the practice of ‘nightcrawling‘, whereby self-employed cameramen shoot footage of violent incidents and sell it to local television stations for broadcast the following day.  Lou trades a stolen bicycle for a camcorder and a radio scanner which enables him to tune in to police messages about accidents or crimes that have just occurred.  He sells his first piece of footage, of a carjacking, for only a modest sum but he piques the interest of Nina Romina (Rene Russo), the TV news director who buys the footage.  She speaks to Lou the kind of words traditionally used to console a cultural aspirant – ‘… but we’d be interested to see more of your work’.  Nina, however, means what she says:  the station she works for is desperate to increase its viewing figures.  With this in mind, she gives Lou a further piece of advice.  The station is particularly interested in footage of horrors in well-off neighbourhoods – it’s these that attract the biggest audiences.  Lou takes Nina at her word.  He also shows entrepreneurial and creative flair.   He employs an assistant, Rick (Riz Ahmed), another young man desperate for a job and prepared to work for next to nothing, whose navigation is meant to get fast-driving Lou to the scene of the crime or accident in double-quick time.  When he arrives early enough, Lou may rearrange the scene – for example, by moving a corpse – to enhance the visual impact of what he’s about to shoot.  Nina is increasingly excited by what Lou brings her and he starts to make money.

Dan Gilroy uses the pathological personality of Lou Bloom to explore and condemn a pathological practice.  That he succeeds so well is thanks very largely to Jake Gyllenhaal.  In the film’s opening scene, Gyllenhaal’s face emerges from the darkness – the face is gaunt and grey and the eyes in it are huge.  He suggests one of the undead and that vampire quality never leaves you.  Gyllenhaal’s audience rapport, as strong as ever, creates a complicity between the character he’s playing and the viewer:  there’s a part of you that’s rooting for Lou (and a part of you that isn’t).  Lou Bloom has at least two obvious screen progenitors – Norman Bates and Travis Bickle.  He brings one or both of them to mind at several points:  near the start, when, in an unavailing attempt to get a job, he waxes moralistic (about the virtues of working for a living); in a glimpse of his isolated home life; in his shyly charming-but-creepy invitation to Nina Romina that they go out to dinner.  But Lou is also distinct from his notorious kin in that his psychopathy and solitariness are combined with commercial hard-headedness.   When he asks Nina for sex and she declines, he threatens to take his footage elsewhere.  Gilroy doesn’t make clear whether that threat is enough to change Nina’s mind – the lack of clarity is effective in the sense that it makes the viewer less sure, and more uncomfortable, about both characters.  In any case, the final exchange between Lou and Nina at the television station offices is breathlessly intimate.  He has certainly seduced her professionally.

About halfway through, I started to wonder if Jake Gyllenhaal’s acutely witty performance might be causing the director to concentrate too much on his protagonist’s spellbinding lack of conscience and to lose sight of the larger context in which that lack of conscience is expressed.  But Dan Gilroy (Tony’s younger brother:  they’re the sons of the playwright Frank Gilroy) regains a tense balance between these elements and the last part of Nightcrawler seemed to me very successful.  Rooting for Lou is not only a consequence of Gyllenhaal’s natural likeability.  It would be a pompous and rather pointless cheat if the character’s appalling behaviour were punished but the practice of nightcrawling continued (which, if it’s really happening, it obviously has to do).  Lou’s projects become increasingly ambitious and amoral:  the film ends at the point at which he has thwarted police attempts to bring him to book for his pièce de résistance – which involves his getting Rick shot then filming his assistant as he lies dying.  Lou takes on new interns and buys some smart new vans, decorated with his company’s logo. ‘Remember’, he tells the interns, ‘I would never ask you to do anything I wouldn’t do myself’.

This is one of several satirical flourishes in the dialogue that Gilroy allows himself in the closing stages.  In the police interview room, Lou looks into the CCTV camera and says, ‘I like to say that if you’re seeing me you’re having the worst day of your life’.   Nina’s colleague deplores what she’s allowed Lou to get away with; ‘I think Louis is inspiring us to aim higher’, Nina replies.  This verbal showing off is well enough earned (and enjoyable):  until this point, Gilroy has resisted easy censoriousness.  He’s scathing about the ethics of broadcast news – about the implications of what it can mean for news stations to claim they’re providing viewers with ‘the truth’.  He’s frank about the public appetite for grisly sensation and tendency towards envious vindictiveness that the stations which make use of nightcrawler footage are exploiting.  (The hypocrisy of the news anchors’ advice, as they introduce the scenes of carnage Lou has supplied, is horribly funny:  it’s the viewers who are cautioned ‘to use discretion’ in watching.)  At the same time, Gilroy is presenting individuals – Lou, Rick and Nina – under economic pressure, people who, quite simply, need to get and keep a job.   The cinematography by Robert Elswit makes Los Angeles deadly beautiful.  James Newton Howard’s pulsing score adds to the fascinating discomfort of Nightcrawler.

13 November 2014