The Only Surprise in Nightcrawler Is Its Grotesqueness

Not becoming a franchise star might have been the best thing that ever happened to Jake Gyllenhaal. Back in 2010, the actor bulked and bronzed up to play the lead in Jerry Bruckheimer's Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, a big-budget adaptation of a video-game that was meant to be the first in a string of blockbusters. But the public steered clear, momentarily dashing any dreams Gyllenhaal might have had of seeing his face on millions of lunch boxes. The upside, however, was that he was liberated to become a serious actor again. And since then, he's been dogged in his pursuit of challenging material: Source Code, Prisoners, Enemy. The results have been astonishing, even if the box office receipts have not. Now, in Dan Gilroy's Nightcrawler, the 33-year-old has delivered what could be his best—and creepiest—performance to date.

Gyllenhaal is almost unrecognizable as Lou Bloom, a garrulous and more than slightly off L.A. fringe dweller who sells stolen scrap metal. The actor lost about 30 pounds for the role, but it's unclear whether the script called for it or if Gyllenhaal just wanted to make us feel how morally hollow his character is, how he's spiritually rotting away from the inside. He has a bug-eyed intensity that gives the movie its nervous, late-night tweaker energy. While driving home on the freeway, Lou spots a car on fire by the side of the road. He pulls over and watches a cameraman (Bill Paxton) film the police as they extract the injured driver from the twisted wreckage. Lou feels the rush of it. And his buzz is only heightened when he sees the footage on the news the next morning. He's hooked on the excitement, the life-and-death thrill, the proximity to something newsworthy. He decides then and there to become a ''nightcrawler.''

The first half of the film chronicles Lou's baptism into the profession—how he goes from an ambulance-chasing wannabe to a fearless camcorder-wielding Weegee. Gilroy's ace cinematographer, Robert Elswit, makes L.A. feel like an abandoned neon-lit alien planet rife with lethal danger. Prowling the streets in the wee hours, with an ear cocked to a crackling police scanner, Lou and his naive, slightly dim assistant (Riz Ahmed) hightail it from one crime scene to the next, capturing bloody footage that they sell to Nina (Rene Russo), a producer working the graveyard shift at the city's lowest-rated network. She's desperate for the most sensational footage she can get. ''Think of our newscast as a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut,'' she says. Lou's video is close-up and gory and aimed squarely at the fears of the upscale white demo she courts. He's willing to do whatever it takes to get the goods, even if that means withholding evidence from the police or moving the body at the scene of a car crash to stage a better shot. Like Gyllenhaal, Russo is dynamite in the film, though at times her overheated performance is a little too reminiscent of Faye Dunaway's amoral news viper Diana Christensen in Network.

The comparison to Paddy Chayefsky and Sidney Lumet's classic 1976 media satire isn't an idle one. It's been 38 years since Network howled from the window, warning us where our baser instincts were leading the medium of television. We've not only ignored that film's doomsday prophecy, we've actually surrendered to the dark side. In its wickedly twisted way, Nightcrawler keeps Network's battle cry alive. It's a 21st-century takedown of the media's pandering ''if it bleeds, it leads'' ethos and the ghoulish nightcrawlers who live by it. B+.

When Lon Chaney played the Phantom of the Opera in 1925, he used thin wires to pull back his lids and make his eyes bulge like a shrunken head’s. Jake Gyllenhaal in the dark, chilly, quasi-comedy Nightcrawler achieves the same effect with no apparent prosthetic help. As the psychotic go-getter antihero, Louis Bloom, he drives around Los Angeles listening intently to a police scanner, waiting for word of an accident or violent crime that he can capture on digital video and sell to an eager local TV station, where “if it bleeds, it leads.” If Gyllenhaal blinks in the movie, I missed it. Super-size peepers fixed on his prey, he creeps towards wrecked cars and dead bodies like a ghoul on the verge of drooling and dropping to all fours; with the yellow moon rising in back of him, he looks ready to howl.

Writer-director Dan Gilroy seems to think that Louis is a fascinating specimen — a symbol of conscienceless capitalism in an economically desperate society — and that the movie also functions as a macabre media satire. But after a few minutes you know everything about Louis you’re going to know; the only surprise in Nightcrawler is the level of grotesqueness it achieves. There’s more insight (and entertainment) in an average sketch from the old SCTV series; I kept imagining Joe Flaherty’s horror host Count Floyd climbing out of his coffin and chanting, “Oooh, that Louis, he’s veh-ry skerrrr-y, kiddies — ahwoooooooo!”

Gilroy’s brother and the film’s co-producer, Tony, is best known for the paranoid conspiracy thriller Michael Clayton, which also explores what awful things decent (or at least not-totally-monstrous) people will do for a money in a culture where the rich routinely poison the lives of the poor. But Michael Clayton had a relatively conventional “conversion” structure: The protagonist (George Clooney) had to be stunned by the enormity of his corruption and risk his life to right his wrongs. Working from the same (admittedly laudable) motives, Dan Gilroy goes the other way with a vengeance. From the start we see that Louis Bloom isn’t capable of growth or change. He’s a borderline idiot. He has already been driven mad by poverty and its attendant envy, and has studied the pertinent How to Succeed sites on the internet. Selling himself to potential employers, he tonelessly parrots hard-charging business shibboleths — “I’m bold, I’m persistent, I’m self-motivating ... I know that if you wanna win the lottery, you have to work hard to buy a ticket ...” The other characters gaze on him like the nutjob he is but are more and more powerless to stop him.

Those others exist either to be lead astray or victimized. Rene Russo plays the night-shift TV producer whose mandate is “to show how urban crime creeps into the suburbs ... whites injured at the hands of minorities”; Louis blackmails her into bed (he says he likes older woman) and induces her to air appalling footage by assuring her that there’s “no better way to achieve job security.” (Kevin Rahm — Ted on Mad Men — plays the colleague of Russo’s who watches in horror, tsk-tsking, the role a fixture in politically barbed melodramas like A Face in the Crowd.) Bill Paxton is the established freelance “nightcrawler” whose competition pushes Louis to ever-greater heights of immorality. Riz Ahmed plays the homeless guy to whom Louis gives an “internship” and steers to the dark side. He’s the only wild card in the film, but he’s so undercharacterized that you can guess exactly what he’ll do and the nature of his fate.

Nightcrawler has a fair number of admirers who think it has something powerful to say about the state of the culture. I get it. Lines like Louis’s “I want to be the guy that owns the station that owns the camera” make him a useful stand-in for demonically exploitative Wall Street titans, and you can see how the movie aspires to be What Makes Sammy Run? for the digital age. But overnight broadcasts by small local stations aren’t exactly at the forefront these days — Louis could conceivably make more money by building his own website, which would allow Gilroy to introduce some tricky new variables into the equation. But those variables would require the kind of rethinking that would interfere with the film’s “purity.” Gyllenhaal’s whompingly one-note performance tells you all you need to know. He’s veh-ry skerrrr-y, kiddies — ahwoooooooo!