In the Flesh: Nightcrawler

Jake Gyllenhaal is one of those leading men who only really works if he’s playing an absolute freak. His sunken cheeks, his big, wet eyes, his sensual lips — he has the presence of something between an underwear model and a school shooter, and that particular vein of discomfiting sleaze has never been mined so thoroughly as it is in Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler. The minute petty thief Lou Bloom appears on screen, the obviousness of his dysfunctionality seems almost to ooze from his pores. His personality is transparently the result of a long and eclectic process of accumulated observations, stitched together to resemble the world around him but frighteningly uncanny when observed up close. He cracks hearty smiles, spews self-help and business jargon, and generally contorts himself into shapes he associates with normalcy. There’s a formidable intellect behind Lou’s vacant stare, but it has no emotional interest in other human beings beyond their ability to satisfy his desires. De Niro’s work as Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver has been riffed on many times, but Gyllenhaal is one of the few to make his own variation feel truly distinct.

Lou’s relationship to other people closely mirrors the relationship we’re shown between nightly news director Nina Romina (Rene Russo) and her viewing public: cynical, acquisitive, and based on fear and misinformation. Just as Lou immiserates and manipulates his near-homeless “intern” Rick (Riz Ahmed), leveraging his desperation to entice him into illegal acts, Nina plays on thinly-veiled racist anxieties in her suburban viewers to keep them glued to her network, even going so far as to selectively omit details of lurid crimes to make them better suit her narrative. Gilroy transforms LA into a shadowy hunting ground for the two opportunists, using the city’s urban gloom with deft restraint, but it’s his mastery over sentimentality that pushes Nightcrawler past mere competence. The film’s score is frequently sentimental, almost saccharine, playing us with the same broad, contemptuous sensibilities with which Lou and Nina approach the public. Gilroy plays with the same feeling with the film’s visuals, as when Lou professes to being moved by a dead, lifeless wall-length print of Los Angeles at night.

“I’m so tired,” says Rick as he climbs into Lou’s car to begin another night of chasing tragedy and gore through the city’s labyrinthine streets. “Aren’t you tired?” Lou doesn’t answer. What he is doesn’t sleep, and nor does the tremendous and ever-ravenous machinery his work exists to feed. We want to look at horrors and know we’re safe in our homes. We want to see acts of inhuman viciousness and hear that our prejudices are based not in knee-jerk terror of the Other but in real, provable fact. We want people like Lou and Nina to uncover our worst urges, our most morally and intellectually cowardly thoughts and desires, and to fulfill them with only the thinnest curtain of plausible deniability drawn between us and the gaping pit of our vestigial tribal instincts. We want to tell ourselves we’re good for feeling rotten things, and we want a soundtrack straight out of The West Wing to congratulate us while we do.