Nightcrawler (2014, Dir. Dan Gilroy):
“I’d like to think if you’re seeing me you’re having the worst day of your life.”
— Jake Gyllenhaal, Nightcrawler
“I hate street accidents. I can’t stand the sight of blood — you can see I took that picture with my eyes shut.”
“To me, a picture’s a picture.”
— Shakedown (1950)
The shadowy streets of the city at night, when the do-gooders seek refuge and the no-gooders come out to play. In the midst of it, a man armed only with bottomless ambition and a camera, poised to surrender all morals in order to get that elusive moneymaking shot. That’s the set-up of Shakedown, a B-picture that still ranks as one of the toughest noir films. As subtle as a punch to the mouth, and with Rock Hudson’s first appearance in a movie to boot (blink and you’ll miss him, he’s the auto valet), Shakedown is a no-frills rocket that charts the archetypal American success story in 80 minutes: rags to riches to corruption to death.
Strip away the glossy sheen and nearly two-hour running time, and Nightcrawler is more or less an update of that tale. Like Shakedown‘s Jack Early (Howard Duff), Louis Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a penniless striver with a lot of gumption and a predilection for breaking the law, but where Early was a lovable palooka with big ideas, Bloom is plain loco. Hopped up on capitalistic impulses and self-help homilies, he can’t carry on a conversation without freaking out his listener with emphatic statements like “My motto is if you want to win the lottery you’ve got to make money to get a ticket.” Dashing from crime scene to crime scene with his video camera (it’s the 21st century, after all), Bloom only blooms at night, grinning like a coyote under the Hollywood moon, seemingly just another crackpot doomed to wither away on the mean streets… and then he finds his savior in a struggling TV producer (Rene Russo) who needs his raw, uncensored footage to dig her third-rate news program out of the ratings doldrums (“What I need is a screaming woman, running down the street, with her throat cut,” she says). Empowered and power-mad, Bloom is inspired to push the envelope, with sobering consequences.
There’s very little mystery to Nightcrawler‘s intentions. Forget about losing one’s soul to the night — Gyllenhaal’s Bloom, with his eyes jacked wide open and cheeks caved in, is already a vampire with a cheap camcorder. That’s not necessarily a drawback; noir is stuffed with anti-heroes who willingly let their impulses lead them to their doom. The only question that drives the plot is how many lines will be crossed in the name of getting ahead, and Nightcrawler, written and directed by Dan Gilroy (whose brother Tony is known for the Jason Bourne movies and Michael Clayton), takes its time enveloping us in its moral rot: it’s like sliding into a hot bubble bath, just after our wrists have been slashed. Before long Bloom is practically enslaving a homeless lackey to to do his bidding (Riz Ahmed, touchingly foggy), rearranging crime scenes, and rubbing shoulders with TV studio bigwigs, when he’s not blackmailing Russo into his bed. It’s about as realistic a representation of network news as Tony Gilroy’s depiction of the intelligence services in the Bourne films, but the movie’s sliminess has an undeniable pull. It also helps that Gyllenhaal has some juicy dialogue to masticate; he’s never been a cuddly presence in the movies, but now that he’s gotten in touch with his dark side as an actor, he can find the chill as well as the humor in a line such as “What if my problem wasn’t that I don’t understand people but that I don’t like them?”
“Who am I? I’m a hard worker. I set high goals and I’ve been told that I’m persistent.”
If that were all there was to it, Nightcrawler would be a worthy successor to Shakedown, yet it aspires to more: we’re meant to be horrified by the lengths Bloom goes to, and reflect on our culpability in creating a media-crazed universe that would spawn creatures like him. Gaze into the abyss, and see the world for how it really is, the film wants to tell us. All well and good, but Nightcrawler stays monotone when it should be shooting for Network levels of lunacy. The film’s style remains locked within Bloom’s frosty point of view — every crime is just another opportunity for slick whip-pans of speeding cars and streetlights, all bathed in Robert Elswit’s luminescent cinematography, while James Newton Howard’s soundtrack strains for a poignance that was never there to begin with. Shakedown allowed you to get caught up in the thrill of illicit activity; Gilroy undermines his material by opting for taste over pulp. Still, Nightcrawler is worth viewing for Gyllenhaal’s knotty performance, and those silent moments in which he’s hustling towards the next catastrophe with the blank voracious moon reflected in his eyes, not a hint of sweat or even a pulse under that gaunt smile.
