By Jake Howell jake.howell@utoronto.ca
The Torontonian Reviews NIGHTCRAWLER
Currently my favourite film at TIFF, Nightcrawler is so refreshingly original that it’s surprising to see it’s also screenwriter Dan Gilroy’s directorial debut. But it is, and that’s fantastic, because the film goes places and takes risks I wish were more common in North American cinema. The result is a memorable, even great first feature.
Finding himself in what feels like an especially twisted episode of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” Jake Gyllenhaal plays Lou Bloom, a sallow, greasy-haired sociopath who can’t find a job—or an unpaid internship, a frustration mined here for laughs—no matter how many employers he harangues with self-help psychobabble. Giving up on the idea of working for someone else and witnessing a brutal accident on the freeway, Lou is inspired to “nightcrawl,” which means combing the streets of Los Angeles for footage of crime scenes to sell to local news channels. It’s the type of work that another cameraman describes as a “flaming asshole of a job,” because who wants to shove a camera in the face of someone bleeding out in a crashed car?
Lou Bloom does! Or at least he doesn’t give a shit. That’s good news for us, because it’s morbidly riveting to see him snake inside active crime scenes to get footage of mangled bodies that the morning news is dying to showcase, paying top dollar for images of white-collar corpses. A character to remember, Lou is as enterprising as Howard Roark, as intense as Timothy Ferriss, and as batty as Cosmo Kramer. As he improves his craft and grows his business—Lou self-identifies as a “quick learner”—he takes on Rick (Riz Ahmed), an illiterate and homeless twentysomething who wants to get paid any way he can. Rick assists in the navigation and parks their car when they get to a crime scene, and seeing Lou in an employer capacity is wonderfully fucked-up.
Gilroy’s wife Rene Russo plays Linda, Lou’s cougar contact at the television station, and when she outlines what kind of footage she’s looking to purchase she reminds Lou that the newscast needs to resemble “a woman running down the street screaming her head off.” That means in terms of cable news, instilling fear in the viewers at home is paramount, and the critique of institutional racism and the maxim “if it bleeds, it leads” here is a bigger indictment on Los Angeles than David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars, and Dan Gilroy has written something even more depraved than Bruce Wagner’s script for that movie. Nightcrawler is tastelessly sick in the best way possible, and Gyllenhaal is hilarious as a slimy creep with sunken eyes. (“I like to say that if you ever see me, you’re having the worst day of your life.”) There’s something to be said about the effectiveness of this movie’s tone: we don’t see very much action (the violence is mostly shown via its aftermath) and we don’t see any sex at all. But those cinematic pleasures are still found in Nightcrawler’s are-they-actually-going-there narrative and intense sexual tension, compliments of Gilroy’s excellent witty, cynical script.
