By JAKOB HAND
COLUMNIST
Television news is rarely a pretty thing, but “Nightcrawler” puts an ugly face on some of the dark persons behind its production. One of those faces belongs to Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal), a young man looking for a life on the streets of Los Angeles. After witnessing a rescue during a car fire on the highway one night, Bloom meets videographer Joe Loder (Bill Paxton) who introduces Lou to the business of filming for TV news. “If it bleeds it leads,” Joe tells Lou, which is enough to get Lou to sell his bike and some scrap metal to buy the equipment he needs to become a ‘nightcrawler.’ Lou quickly learns the business of ‘nightcrawling,’ roaming the streets armed with a camera and police scanner and selling his video to Nina (Rene Russo) a news producer who needs Lou’s video to compete with the gory video obtained by other news teams for their morning news segments.
After several successful sales, Lou hires Rick (Riz Ahmed) as an intern to help him in his exploits. Rick quickly recognizes the horrible moral choices Lou makes to get the video he wants. Lou films dying carjacking victims, house fires, and drags the bodies of accident victims to different places in order to improve the shots he gets. Lou and Rick speed around Los Angeles via sports car to get to each new bloody news story first, hoping to get the best footage before the police clear the scene. After Lou and Rick arrive at a triple homicide involving a wealthy family long before the police, Lou drags Rick into a dangerous situation involving dangerous criminals in the name of getting the best news footage.
Writer and director Dan Gilroy succeeds brilliantly in his debut film, bringing the streets of Los Angeles to life and packing enough adrenaline filled car chases into his movie for a Nascar documentary. Gyllenhaal brings Lou Bloom to life in a seedy way that not many other actors could. Unnaturally skinny and sporting a greasy ponytail, Gyllenhaal delivers his best performance since “Brokeback Mountain,” and makes Lou Bloom both a fear inducing and yet captivating character. The movie’s excellent editing and cinematography help keep the audience transfixed, making “Nightcrawler” one of the most exciting and fast paced noir films to be made in years.
Although it is easy to forget amidst all of the gloom and tension, “Nightcrawler” also offers excellent criticism of the way that our news is produced and marketed. Like “Network” and “Goodnight and Good Luck,” “Nightcrawler” offers a reminder of how inhuman the news production process can be and how much of it we eat up on such a regular basis.