Nightcrawler (2014)
Directed by Dan Gilroy
When Lou Bloom, desperate for work, muscles into the world of L.A. crime journalism, he blurs the line between observer and participant to become the star of his own story. Aiding him in his effort is Nina, a TV-news veteran.
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What critics say influenced Nightcrawler
While Taxi Driver is a clear influence (there's even an allusion to De Niro's mirror scenes), Lou doesn't develop into a ruthlessly opportunistic go-getter; he starts out that way.
As shot by Robert Elswit (“There Will Be Blood,” “Michael Clayton”), the directorial debut of screenwriter Dan Gilroy (“The Bourne Legacy”) makes the low-to-the-ground desert city look like a parallel to the hellish landscapes of 1970s New York City in Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver.”
Gyllenhaal’s creepazoid theatrics are superficially amusing (he plays every interaction like Travis’ “Henry Krinkle” conversation with the Secret Service agent in Taxi Driver, right down to the icky fake smile) but leave the viewer at a safe reserve.
You are likely to hear some comparisons to “Taxi Driver” bantered about in reference to “Nightcrawler,” but Louis Bloom is a wholly original nightmare who doesn’t transform over the course of the film, but instead settles comfortably into a niche we have carved out for him.
Bloom is more akin to the sociopaths in Taxi Driver and Peeping Tom.
Louis Bloom isn’t an iconic and righteous anti-hero like Ryan Gosling’s Driver or Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle in “Taxi Driver,” though – he’s the Hannibal Lecter of the TV-news satire, the kind of guy who’s fascinating from afar, but you’d never want to tango with him.
While the variously horrific crime scenes make for some almost unbearable tension, Gilroy's script hews closer to satire than a traditional thriller, particularly in its portrait of the TV news station where Lou is employed by bloodthirsty exec Nina (Rene Russo, channeling Network 's Faye Dunaway).
While Nina is a caricature, not unlike Faye Dunaway�s character who exploited Peter Finch�s �Mad as hell� character in 1976�s Network, she�s not quite as over the top as Faye, and is, therefore, a little more believable.
Nightcrawler is cynical, but so was Network, Sweet Smell of Success, or Ace In The Hole (this film’s very clearly spiritual mentor).
The other 1970s' film Nightcrawler has been compared to is Network.
Paddy Chayefsky’s Network remains the patented gold standard for commenting on our out-of-control TV mentality.
This isn’t the first time that subject has been satirized before in cinema (perhaps most notably in Sidney Lumet’s 1977 Oscar-winning film “Network”), but “Nightcrawler” tells its debauched tale of immorality in the newsroom through the eyes of a Rupert Pupkin-esque antihero more frightening than any masked killer.
He’s created a colourful world in this dark corner of California, but the full vibrancy of the city never quite registers the way it has in after-hours thrillers like Collateral and Heat (a Michael Mann connection is engendered immediately, thanks to Lou borrowing James Caan’s leather jacket from Thief ).
There’s a harsh, neon brassiness about the film that’s very Eighties: not just in the climactic car chase action (in a way, as opportunistic as Louis himself), but in the overall look, with DP Robert Elswit giving Los Angeles and its night lights a synthetic metallic sheen, with echoes of Michael Mann, from Thief to Collateral.
It was shot both digitally and on film, as was Michael Mann’s “Collateral,” another nervous nocturnal thriller, set in the same city.
For a first-time feature, Nightcrawler benefits from an accomplished technical package, highlighted by sharp widescreen cinematography from Robert Elswit (who’s worked regularly with Paul Thomas Anderson) that captures the L.A. backdrops in an array of bright color, and a score by James Newton Howard that recalls the hypnotic melodies he composed for Michael Mann’s Collateral – another City of Angels noir set during the wee hours of the night, and for which this film feels like a distant, crazy cousin: one whose weapon of choice is the camera itself.
You can feel it in Michael Mann's Heat , or in Collateral a decade later.
“Nightcrawler,” which Gilroy also wrote, shares a lineage with some great American films, including “Network,” Michael Mann’s “Collateral” and the signature works of Martin Scorsese, including “Taxi Driver” and “The King of Comedy.”
Nightcrawler is cynical, but so was Network, Sweet Smell of Success, or Ace In The Hole (this film’s very clearly spiritual mentor).
Produced by the director/writer's brother, Tony Gilroy, and edited by his other brother, John Gilroy, "Nightcrawler," as the title promises, takes us into the underbelly of big city "news" removed of all ethical and moral barricades, something like an update of Billy Wilder's classic newsman drama "Ace in the Hole."
If Sidney Lumet’s “Network” and Billy Wilder’ s “Ace in the Hole’’ had a mutant baby, it would probably look like Dan Gilroy’s “Nightcrawler,” a pitch-black satire of local TV news in Los Angeles with an eye-popping performance by Jake Gyllenhaal as the paparazzo from Hell.
Nightcrawler is the directorial debut of screenwriter Dan Gilroy (The Bourne Legacy), and it’s framed as a movie about the media, with some of the purplish, strident dialogue of Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole (1951) or Sidney Lumet’s Network.
As a satire on tabloid journalism, it is in the cynical tradition of Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole.
He is like a Billy Wilder hero (Kirk Douglas’s unscrupulous reporter, say, from “Ace in the Hole”), transplanted to the land of David Lynch.
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He’s created a colourful world in this dark corner of California, but the full vibrancy of the city never quite registers the way it has in after-hours thrillers like Collateral and Heat (a Michael Mann connection is engendered immediately, thanks to Lou borrowing James Caan’s leather jacket from Thief ).
There’s a harsh, neon brassiness about the film that’s very Eighties: not just in the climactic car chase action (in a way, as opportunistic as Louis himself), but in the overall look, with DP Robert Elswit giving Los Angeles and its night lights a synthetic metallic sheen, with echoes of Michael Mann, from Thief to Collateral.
Viewers will be reminded of the Bret Easton Ellis adaptation of “American Psycho” as Bloom methodically increases his bloody level of wrong-doing in pursuit of capturing the perfect crime.
Lou, the character Jake Gyllenhaal plays in the darkly funny, terrifically smart little film Nightcrawler , at first seems like a simple riff on someone like Gordon Gekko from Wall Street or Patrick Bateman from American Psycho — a sociopath who has absorbed the lessons of his culture so thoroughly that they have become the blood running through his veins.
He might be the post-recession cousin of Christian Bale in American Psycho.
Bloom is more akin to the sociopaths in Taxi Driver and Peeping Tom.
But while “Nightcrawler” plays first and foremost as a lurid, borderline-satirical thriller about a disturbed individual who pushes the disturbed logic of 21st-century media to its ultimate conclusion, Gilroy clearly has some larger questions in view, along with a cinematic legacy that includes “Taxi Driver,” “Network” and Michael Powell’s 1960 shocker “Peeping Tom,” a movie whose influence only continues to grow.
If one were to somehow merge the Scorsese-directed Robert De Niro characters Travis Bickle (of Taxi Driver) and Rupert Pupkin (of The King of Comedy), the result, I imagine, would be someone very much like Lou Bloom, the antiheroic lead played by Jake Gyllenhaal in writer/director Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler.
He’s like a cross between two of Robert De Niro’s most memorable and sociopathic characters from Martin Scorsese movies: Travis Bickle, Taxi Driver’s “I can’t sleep nights” rolling time bomb; and Rupert Pupkin, The King of Comedy’s delusional narcissist, who stops at nothing to get on TV.
Oozing traces of Taxi Driver‘s Travis Bickle, with a smudge of The King of Comedy‘s Rupert Pupkin on the side, Gyllenhaal shed 30 pounds to play the ever-hungry Louis Bloom, morphing his handsome, expressive face into a gaunt, dingy-toothed jack-o-lantern, his wolfish grin flashing at the slightest glimmer of leverage.
At the same time, he’s a socially clueless character, like Robert De Niro’s Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy, given to quoting inane, optimistic affirmations and business guides like an alien who has arrived on Earth and is experimenting with operating manuals.
Jake Gyllenhaal is blistering as Louis Bloom, a wiry, bug-eyed go-getter, and plausible descendant of The King of Comedy 's Rupert Pupkin, except with a proclivity for messing with the maimed and deceased.
“Nightcrawler,” which Gilroy also wrote, shares a lineage with some great American films, including “Network,” Michael Mann’s “Collateral” and the signature works of Martin Scorsese, including “Taxi Driver” and “The King of Comedy.”
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The use of media, to invoke the nature of looking, in crime films in nothing new, especially when considering the element in Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966); DePalma’s tribute to the ’66 film, Blow Out (1981); and Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), which notes that possessing (i.e., recording) all the information is knowing too much.
But both scenes are really just trumped-up versions of William Hurt’s post-produced crocodile tears in “Broadcast News,” and anything but shocking at a time when we’ve come to expect professional framing and lighting from even an ISIS beheading video.
But truthfully, it isn’t saying anything about the relationship between the media and society — and the toxic and symbiotic voyeurism that fuels it — that hadn’t been said already, decades earlier, in eerily prescient films from “Ace in the Hole” (1951) to “Network” (1976) to “Broadcast News” (1987).
What Gilroy and Gyllenhaal are up to here is a kind of amped-up Broadcast News meets Network meets Bringing Out the Dead for the TMZ and reality show era.
What was once prophetic in movies like Network and Broadcast News is now commonplace.