Ready for his closeup
Lou Bloom is not your typical crime scene cameraman. Played by Jake Gyllenhaal in a memorably creepy turn in Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler, he prowls LA’s night streets with a police scanner and a video cam, looking for fresh disasters. He’s not above certain artistic touches to get the perfect camera angle — such as dragging a dead body closer to the smashed-up vehicle it’s been thrown from in order to frame a better shot.
Bloom is one of those media-obsessed creepy crawlers who seem to flourish in the Hollywood area. He finds his calling taking videos of car crashes, murder scenes and the like. He has a peculiar knack for getting close to bloody victims, unflinching in his search for the closeup, clips he then sells to local TV stations for a quick paycheck. One TV producer who notices his talent is Nina (Rene Russo), who needs more and more sensational footage to earn her show ratings. “Think of our newscast as a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut,” is how Nina describes their show.
This is the kind of video journalism familiar to many Filipinos who watch TV Patrol and other lurid undercover shows. “If it bleeds, it leads” is a familiar mantra going way back in journalism, but with special gory resonance in our video-fed age. Bloom, looking like he fell straight off the creepy truck, is like a babe in the woods when he first starts trailing crime scenes, and he’s routinely scooped by better equipped videographers like Joe Loder (Bill Paxton), but he’s a fast learner. He’s an autodidact who learns everything from the Internet, such as how to create a business plan. His plans for Nina are especially creepy, shown in a dinner scene where Lou is revealed to hold more cards than he seems.
Gyllenhaal does a great job with a character that gets under your skin in a bad way. (The cinema I saw it at was nearly empty. Apparently there’s not much interest in Gyllenhaal playing a skeevy creep.) From moment one, his Lou is repugnant, yet oddly confident in his abilities. With his bugged-out eyes, slicked-down hair and vulturish, stooping posture, he’s oddly compelling. In a sense, Nightcrawler is a dark comedy, and Gyllenhaal plays Lou way over the top at times, to suggest how he’s just like anyone else in America, trying to get ahead and better himself.
Lou’s character is akin to other video babies in past creepy movies we’ve seen. He’s like Rupert Pupkin in King of Comedy, obsessed with his 15 minutes of fame, crossed with Nicole Kidman’s ambitious TV anchor wannabe in To Die For.
It’s good that Lou has an assistant, Rick (Riz Ahmed), who navigates while Lou drives maniacally to murder scenes. His growing fear of his employer’s methods is a reality check, lest we start rooting for Bloom too much. When his police scanner leads him to a home invasion in an upscale neighborhood, Bloom doesn’t think twice about crossing the line: he films the perpetrators as they flee, then enters the bedrooms and trains his video camera on the dead victims. Nightcrawler explores the pixelated line between news and sensationalism, which isn’t exactly a news flash itself, but the nervy screenplay by first-time director Gilroy hits all the right buttons.
With the success of shows like Hard Copy and TMZ, Gilroy’s film suggests the only compelling motivation for struggling news shows is to become as lurid as possible. Nina tells Lou she wants more footage like the closeup of a dying crash victim he brought in the night before. “More blood?” Lou says. Nina corrects him: “More… graphic.” Lou is happy to oblige.
Unfortunately, he’s not particularly good at getting interviews, because his imperious tone turns off bystanders at crime scenes. When Lou has a disagreement with his employee, Rick, he corrects the impression that he “has a hard time communicating with people.” “Maybe I just don’t like people,” Lou impassively replies, and it has all the chilly dismissiveness of Joseph Cotton’s creepy turn as Uncle Charlie in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt.
At times, Bloom’s character threatens to dissolve into a horror movie cliché, too evil to be taken seriously. But it’s the can-do spirit that Bloom wears like a second skin that begins to creep you out, as much as his awkward way with fellow human beings. And Gyllenhaal manages to stretch himself, managing to create a character as weird as Donnie Darko, without any of Donnie’s redeeming qualities. Don’t expect an Oscar nod, though; the movie’s actually too subterranean to create any major Academy Award buzz.
