NIGHTCRAWLER (review)

Review by Phil Healy

In the current economic climate millennials aren’t left with many options for employment.

Desperation sets in and they end up moving back in with their folks holding down two to three different jobs praying that someone will find their resume or manuscript and drag them out of the hell-hole of a life they’ve carved out from the festering corpse that is the ‘American Dream’.

Nightcrawler is set in the backdrop of such a world deep in the fiery city of Los Angeles, but the main character Louis Bloom (played devilishly well by Jake Gyllenhaal) isn’t living with his parents or working two to three different jobs to get by.

He’s ripping off train-yards for hundreds of feet of fencing, stealing bikes from people on the Santa Monica pier, and beating people to within an inch of their life for their expensive timepiece.

Still, though, he pursues his version of the American dream.

As Bloom’s journey begins, he struggles to enter the legitimate workforce one awkward interaction at a time. At a construction site, where Bloom actually manages to sell some stolen materials, the foreman tells Bloom, flat out, ‘[He’s] not hiring a thief’ which leads to a comedically awkward exchange with Bloom thanking him for the opportunity.

Such awkward exchanges happen quite a bit and the amusement doesn’t fade. Bloom has an amazing ability to use positive reinforcement with a psychotic tinge leaving you feeling like, at any moment onscreen, he could get violent.

He also resembles a greasy, walking corpse solidifying his status as an LA weirdo or midnight manager at an Arby’s.

Things ramp up a bit when Bloom finds his true calling brushing shoulders with nightcrawler Joe Loder (portrayed by cinematic character-actor great, Bill Paxton). They met when both are at the scene of a highway accident. Bloom pulled over to seemingly scope the situation and see if anyone needed any help. Altruistic on the surface, but Bloom’s face tells a different story of a possible foot in the door with the two officers pulling a young woman from the flaming wreckage. Just as he gets close enough to feel the flame, Joe Loder and his second camerman rush past him to get footage.

A then auditory cue, mastered into a mix of highway traffic, of an airplane taking off signals the ‘ta-da’ moment where Bloom realizes he’s found his true calling: Being a nightcrawler.

What’s a nightcrawler?

Well, if you want to know, it’s someone who goes around town grabbing footage of car accidents, shootings, and other gruesome crime scenes so the evening and early morning news can have some footage packaged in with a story. You need the visuals. That’s what sells.

Well, that and fear; the fear of urban crime (*Whispering* That’s code for ‘black’) spilling into white, affluent areas.

At least that’s how Rene Russo’s character Nina Romina, news director of the midnight shift at KWLA, sees it. A former anchor herself, she’s been mired in the system for so long that she just couldn’t leave. Not being youthful enough kept her off-camera especially in a market such as Los Angeles. Being behind the scenes, however, she still was able to control the news and in a sort of twisted way, she’s able to yank at the strings of these young, pretty little things that sing like canaries to the tune of her pied piping. Well, she’s not that bad or at least overtly so, but when she meets Bloom he stirs something up in her. He has a tendency to do that in everyone he meets.

Throughout the film, whenever you’re clued in to when Bloom has an affinity for something there’s usually a courting period where he samples a certain life-force (A true LA vampire) and uses his findings against the person or situation to get what he’s after.

Nina is no exception. When they first meet Bloom wants her and blackmails her into sleeping with him in order to aid her in bringing the lowest rated network news program in Los Angeles to sweeps glory. Leveraging for love, Bloom is no longer seen as an awkward and ambitious kid with a good eye, but a ruthless schemer leaving her ultimately powerless.

But, despite being a fairly low-rent nightcrawler, he manages to deliver the ratings albeit through specious methods. Some of the carnage and mayhem he covers is even orchestrated by him. These methods don’t sit too well with one of Nina’s fellow colleagues, but she calls the shots. She makes the choice which Bloom, amidst his blackmail speech, lays out is most certainly there. No one can make her do anything.

Some of the other characters fall into this same trap with Bloom.

His co-worker, Rick, who, upon first meeting Bloom for a job interview, is told to really ‘sell himself’ which is a staple of how Bloom conducts himself and reflective of the teachings of an online business course he took. Rich sheepishly mutters that his name is Rick and that he graduated high school. This is punctuated by a sort of sluggish shrug. With body language that screams, ‘I have no permanent address’ and the revelation that he has a cell phone with GPS, Bloom grants him an internship opportunity that pays 30 bucks a night. Cash. Not even really knowing what it is he signed up for, they both vanish into the night hoping to catch some gruesome sights and sounds to sell. Rick is met with an evening of endangerment that extends into a couple of months. They do well together and Bloom is making some real money, but still only pays Rick 30 bucks a night. Rick eventually gets a bump in pay during the final act of the film, but he kind of has to sell his soul a little to get it.

Similar to Nina’s situation, Rick has to make a choice. He’s being leveraged by his need for money and the threat of physical violence by Bloom. The choice is his to make, though. There is a hesitation, but, like Nina, he gives in. Bloom does that to you. He makes you give in based on the world he’s constructed with your interests and needs pitted against you. The choice is almost an illusion, but, once again, it is there.

One person who really didn’t have a choice and succumbed to Bloom’s plan for nightcrawler monopoly is Joe Loder.

Loder actually tries to recruit Bloom after Bloom hits a bit of stride. Recognizing the talent and feeling the need to absorb the competition, he extends and offer. Being a 14 year veteran of nightcrawling in Los Angeles, Loder expresses that he’s doing Bloom a favor by bringing him on and having him join the big boys. Bloom tastes the desperation and doesn’t care for it. On his own and making a name for himself, it’s finally becoming a reality. The dream is formalizing. He rejects Loder’s offer a couple times before blatantly telling him to fuck off via a threat of physical violence. Loder storms off and goes ahead with a plan of having two separate units covering Los Angeles. It works and it essentially wedges out Bloom for an evening and a really big story and this is all during sweeps week.

This proved to be devastating because he couldn’t fulfill his part of the deal he made with Nina (Being that it was the beginning of ‘Sweeps week’) and that if Loder would continue successfully carrying out his new plan Bloom would be squeezed out entirely. There wouldn’t be enough to go around therefore he had to take action. Bloom sabotages a van, Loder gets in an accident, and, ironically enough, is the subject of one of Bloom’s pieces he sells to KWLA. This is much to the chagrin of Rick who audibly objects, ‘He’s one of us, man’. It doesn’t matter.

Bloom wanted to be number one and he needed to fulfill his part of the agreement with Nina. It was all part of the plan. Anyone who got in the way had hell to pay.

Now, we have Bloom without anything really holding him back.

He strikes gold by arriving at a crime scene before the cops arrive (He uses a police band radio). Witnessing a shooting in an upscale neighborhood, he grabs footage of the assailants getting out of the house and fleeing the scene. When he delivers the footage to Nina (A holy grail of ‘fear media’) and the police, he cuts out everything with the assailants, but leaves a copy for himself. Lying to everyone about it, even Rich at first, Bloom plots out the next step and decides to play out a situation where he’s the first and only person there. He’s fully orchestrated a crime by following the assailants the next night and calling it in. Sitting back, he waits as a firefight and car chase ensue. All of it caught by him and Rick, but at quite a cost.

Nina gets another masterpiece and we’re left with angered detectives foaming at the mouth for footage because, and rightfully so, they claim it as evidence. But, as the wheels of justice stall out, Nina shoots back that the footage is owned by KWLA and they’d need a court order to get it. Bloom ends up being brought into questioning, but nothing comes of it. The detectives see right through him though. Still, Bloom doesn’t crack. In fact, after leaving unscathed and presumably a short time after (Maybe a month or so) he unleashes two new vans of his production company, ‘Video Production News’ stocked with 3 additional interns (Presumably unpaid).

I enjoyed this movie. It reminded a good deal of another recent favorite of mine, David Fincher’s Gone Girl.

While Gone Girl is a bit more deceitful in its methods, which is part of its charm, Nightcrawler is definitely more straight forward about its protagonist pretty much using everyone else as a pawn and operating with no regard other human beings.

Rick, played wonderfully by Riz Ahmed, even musters up the gall to tell Bloom that he doesn’t get people. This is regards to how he treats Rick like a sort of lap dog constantly trying to reinforce his own methods and will upon him. Bloom responds back with something to the effect of maybe it isn’t that he doesn’t get people, but, rather, he doesn’t care for or like them. This cold disassociation is the blueprint for Bloom. It can be seen as cheap, in so many circles, to have a character blatantly say something like (Show me, don’t tell me), but Bloom’s overall behavior reflects that statement long before he comes clean, so to speak.

The statement itself also is another piece of the jenga puzzle that encapsulates his sort of autistic-esque interaction with everyone around him which lend to, as I stated in the beginning, amusing exchanges. Gyllenhaal nails it too. You feel a great uneasiness with him around others, but, when he’s alone in his apartment you can see him being a bit more tranquil. When he’s watering his plant there’s an actual care there in his body language.

Truly, humans are all buttons for him to press.

Technical aspects of the film that have to be mentioned are, above all, the cinematography.

It has a great grimy look to it that resembles the feel of being a nightcrawler and existing on the fringe. The quality seems to get less grainy and the camera movement appears to be more involved and elaborate as the movie progresses. This also coincides with Bloom’s improved equipment. I could be dead wrong, but that’s most certainly how it felt. The sound was pretty great too. A moment that I noted earlier where Bloom is realizing that he wants to pursue nightcrawling is extenuated beautifully by the overpowering sound effect of an airplane taking off over the bedrock of background traffic.

His brain is running with this idea and it’s just taking off his head. Like I said, it’s a great ‘to-do’ moment. The rest of the sound, including gunshots and car crashes, etc. have a great grounded feeling. You don’t hear a gun shot a lot, but when you do it’s fairly jarring. With that being said, the final act’s car chase scene is really well filmed and you truly feel the danger of the situation.

That was sort of unexpected as far as my preconceived notion of the movie.

To that note, I didn’t know what to expect.

I had an idea about it being kind of a exploitation movie or a sort of midnight movie and it was and in all the most beautiful ways. The acting was superb. Everyone in it was believable and showed a good range of emotions that seemed to be grounded and pinned by a sense of need to stay relevant to themselves and to their surroundings.

One of the central themes of fear in the media and how network news, like all bits of media, is carefully constructed and has an aim to it. There is a compulsion and belief that self sustains it’s cheap assumptions. The cycle of fear reinforces itself and maybe that spills out from or into the human condition. People see the plug that can be pulled to stop something they don’t agree with morally, but if it truly gets in the way of their way of life or their sheer convenience it may be a victim of non-action.

Like Chinatown, Nightcrawler shows you a city and all its machinations broken down to the beautifully ugly bare bone.

The truth, sometimes, isn’t the best thing.