Review: Nightcrawler

Directed by Dan Gilroy
Written by Dan Gilroy 
Starring Jake Gyllenhaal (Louis Bloom), Rene Russo (Nina Romina), and Riz Ahmed (Rick)
Cinematography by Robert Elswit 
Edited by John Gilroy
Released in 2014

Jake Gyllenhaal has played dangerously obsessive before (Zodiac, Prisoners, Enemy), but his performance as Lou Bloom takes that thread and runs rampant with it. It's one of those rare, totally transformative roles that doesn't involve huge amounts of weight gain/loss or other radical changes in physical appearance. Gyllenhaal creates Bloom through tiny changes in posture, facial patterns, and tone of voice (think Joaquin Phoenix in The Master). He's squirm-inducing from the first frame to the last. I kept trying to worm my way through the back of my seat just to escape his distressingly blank gaze.

Gilroy's film gets all of its bite from it lead. Bloom is an ambulatory collection of self-help books, American Dream platitudes, and business seminar buzzwords. There's not a single time where the facade drops. No humanity or self-reflections is allowed to shine through. We never even learn why he's so driven. Money is the obvious answer, and he's shown buying an expensive care once he has established himself as a guerrilla cameraman. However, he never takes pleasure in showing it off, and he's still stuck in his one-room apartment at the end. Maybe status? Again though, there doesn't seem to be any genuine want for relationships or a higher position. It's all just a means to an end, then another end, and another, and another, and so one and so forth. The true answer is because these are things that capitalist society has deemed important. Bloom has no personality of his own. His desires are a mash-up of what he's heard from other people.

Where Nightcrawler falters is that nothing else is able to match Bloom's crazy ambition. The cinematographer, Robert Elswit, is a frequent collaborator of Paul Thomas Anderson, and I wish some of the formal daring of the likes of Punch-Drunk Love and There Will Be Bloodi had filtered over to here. The only sequence that truly sings is a shootout/car chase near the end that dance neatly between the protagonists' points of view. and that of their cameras. For a story involving amateur directors, Nightcrawler makes surprisingly little use of the possibilities of multiple screens. Similarly, James Newton Howard's score is a bit confused. The music is meant to be satirical, playing Lou's descent as moments of crowd-pleasing triumph, but it comes off as too generic to generate the intended effect.