Night Call

Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal) is an unemployed petty thieve in L.A. He encounters Joe Loder (Bill Paxton) who is filming a car crash. He decides to get into the business of freelance videography for the local news. He is unrestrained in his filming which is exactly what news director Nina Romina (Rene Russo) needs to raise her low ratings. Desperate Rick answers his ad to be his assistant. This is great acting from Gyllenhaal. His crazy eyes pull in the audience right away. In fact, it's shocking to see his gaunt figure. His mannerisms are really creepy. The story is driven by this great performance and the tension never lets up.

Nightcrawler from the very beginning is not a traditional Hollywood film. It certainly does not follow the narrative of one and even though it has the three-act structure we are all familiar with, it spins them around. This is particularly evident in the third act, incredibly suspenseful with a brilliant, almost anti-climax. Suspense is the main key to this film's success, it build and builds to the point where the last twenty minutes of the film are completely unpredictable. Dan Gilroy in his directorial debut here has shown a real understanding of how to keep an audience engaged and following a character who isn't an easy man to spend a great deal of time with. Gilroy's screenplay is fast paced and one of the finest this year. The script focuses the audience on the characters, Louis Bloom particularly yet the supporting characters are just as impressive by Bill Paxton and Rene Russo alike. It doesn't follow the rules of a typical script, we are introduced instantly to a criminal and this man is supposed to be our protagonist. Yet what becomes clear is that there is not a protagonist in Nightcrawler, Jake Gyllenhaal's Louis Bloom is the antagonist. He can be described as nothing less than a psychopath and his portrayal by Gyllenhaal is one of his greatest performances. He is very gaunt here, losing a lot of weight for the role, however that is not the main reason for his impressive performance. Gyllenhaal is an actor who continues to impress me; his work in Enemy from earlier this year was just as brilliant. He has chosen excellent roles in films such as Zodiac, Prisoners and End of Watch. The cinematography is also fantastic, night-time LA has not looked this good since 2011's Drive. All these elements come together to make a captivating piece of filmmaking, a film I expect will be discussed more as time goes on.

Jake Gyllenhaal is the nightcrawler. A nightcrawler is a worm. Bloom, the character played here, is a sociopath. His ambitions and fixations far outweigh common morality. Let's face it, his cohorts in the business aren't much better than he is, but they have a kind of code, and they don't participate in enhancing the crime. When Bloom moves an accident victim for the first time in order to get a better shot, he crosses the line and stays on the other side. He is willing to do anything to get his way and he is a master at monotonous monologue when he is confronted. It's as if he is reading from a book. I heard an interview recently with Gyllenhaal and he recited some of this stuff from memory with almost no emotion. This is a terrific performance by one of our really good actors. The way he is able to slide into every situation unscathed and maintain that sardonic grin is really nonpareil. This is about the voyeurism of the audience which demands this hateful kind of portrayal.

"Nightcrawler" is the kind of film that will catch audiences by surprise with its painstaking thoughtfulness, and features the kind of lead character that will be discussed in film circles who don't detest American cinema and actually give it the benefit of the doubt. The film plunges us into the dark, seedy world of a nightcrawler, somebody who, often working freelance with his or her own equipment and schedule, patrols the streets of crowded cities with multiple police scanners searching for recently-committed crimes in the neighborhood, like rape, shootings, murders, car accidents, and so forth. The object of a nightcrawler is to get candid and intimate shots of the ugliness that plagues these scenarios as quickly and as neatly as possible and sell them to news stations or eyewitness programs to turn quick profit. Job requirements include possible insomniac, lack of emotional connection or any immediate empathy to tragedy or horror, exceptional navigational/driving skills, and a load of free time.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays Lou Bloom, a man at rock-bottom living in Los Angeles, selling scrap metal to get money before eventually turning to the nightcrawling business. He teams up with Rick (Riz Ahmed), a young man desperate to make money to keep a roof over his head, who helps navigate Lou's routes as a nightcrawler and learns of numerous police codes to help Lou decipher the police scanner jargon. Together, the two make for an amateur nightcrawling team, turning profit by selling the footage – expertly shot, analyzed, and even occasionally manipulated by Lou – to Nina (Rene Russo), the station manager of a severely failing news station that is in dire need to regain viewership.

Ultimately, "Nightcrawler" juggles two tricky but immersing features with its material, simultaneously giving us a look into a grimy and often dirty gig as somebody who is essentially a voyeur into the most vulnerable time of the people he meets and posing frightening commentary on contemporary news. The nightcrawler is not looking to help or to provide encouragement; he's there to get his shots and move on, hoping to turn as large of a profit as he can. We see Los Angeles in the light of what could be classifiable as a contemporary film noir, in dark, sometimes shadowy-photography and dingy environments that reveal an ugliness to a city that is normally captured as very beautiful and ideal in terms of climate. Director Dan Gilroy and cinematographer Robert Elswit (a frequent collaborator of Paul Thomas Anderson) do everything in their power to subvert our ideas of Los Angeles and focus on transitory locations that show the ugliest of human events in such a way that is beautiful and captivating thanks to crystal-clear photography.

The other feature "Nightcrawler" toys with is the contemporary exploration of journalistic ethics and how, with local cable news competing with so many twenty-four hour news stations, who, in turn, are also battling more rapidly-updated social media websites, the manipulation of news is ever-present on Television. News programs, like sitcoms, reality shows, and sports events, are a game of numbers and those numbers are ratings – something that "Nightcrawler" makes depressingly clear to us. A crucial scene to this message comes into play when Lou has shot and sold the defining tape of his career and has worked to manipulate it for personal gain. He watches as Nina plays the tape on the air, directing the news anchors in such a specific way in terms of language and mannerisms that we see the fear-mongering happen right before our eyes.

On top of all the social commentary, we see amazingly realistic crime scenes and car accidents to boot. Perhaps it's the lack of intimacy many directors lend to these situations, often showing a car accident, and characters limping and trudging along with little bloodshed, but "Nightcrawler" details these scenes with an incredible eye for attention and realism. Gilroy makes us the voyeur and gives the window into these car accidents that we glance over to see but not entirely anticipate or really want to see. The attention to detail in these seems is simply exquisite and uncommonly believable.

"Nightcrawler," in addition, features a wonderful performance by Gyllenhaal who, like his co-star Paul Dano in last year's "Prisoners," plays detached and empty with such conviction, and channels something of an inner-Philip Seymour Hoffman in "Owning Mahowny," showing his character's complete fulfillment when obsessing over his job and his work. Even Riz Ahmed shouldn't be overlooked here, playing the overworked and under-appreciated assistant to Gyllenhaal's Lou in a role that could've been an empty, and even distracting, side role. The entire project is rich in commentary, performances, and environmental beauty that it could easily be one of the most complete films of the year.

This film essentially tells the story of an ambitious and somewhat psychotic news video freelancer (played by Jake Gyllenhall) who will do anything, literally, to make his way in the world and be successful and a media editor (played by Rene Russo) who,in her own world of news casting, also has few if any scruples when it comes to her career and reputation. Put the two together and you get an escalating set of events in which the video freelancer goes to greater and greater extremes to film shocking scenes of crime, encouraged along by the media editor who is paying for his results.

What makes the film more interesting than just another action drama is the social commentary and the character studies. The main characters are very well crafted, believable, explained through back drop and excellently acted out. The parallels between them are also interesting to observe. Both pretty much without any care for the people around them and focused solely on personal gain. What the video guy will do to get his paycheck is shocking, but what the media editor will do to get her news reel is just as distasteful.

The social commentary is also sharp. The media is portrayed essentially as caring about nothing but a good story, even in fact if that story happens to be untrue. What matters is the narrative and the narrative has to fit the agenda of the media agency. By this measure all news is little more than propaganda. The video guy, despite his barbaric methods and behaviour, is also tolerated by those around him and the message, at least from the media editor and her team (acknowledging one dissenting voice in the film), is that it is OK to be cruel and to hurt others if it is in the pursuit of personal ambition. Both are valid observations and comments on today's society, whether we, the viewers, happen to agree with them or not.

The film also has a touch of originality which isn't easy to do these days when so many movies have already been made. Yes there are studies out there of psychos, yes there are films that vilify the media and there are films about morbid voyeurism and about the exploitation of victims of crime for personal gain. The originality comes from putting them all together. I couldn't really think of a parallel, although others might.

This is well worth watching. You may not ultimately enjoy the film, after all it isn't pleasant, but I am fairly sure you will remember it.