The Desperate Hours: Nightcrawler

There once was the great tarnished golden age of the antihero – it was called the seventies.

Clockwork Orange, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico, The French Connection, and of course, Taxi Driver. 

We don’t get them too often these days, but when we do, they tend to make an impact. I’d put Fight Club on that list, and Breaking Bad. 

I’d also put Nightcrawler. And if you’re misty for those edgy bygone days, thinking they don’t make ‘em like that anymore, you owe it to yourself to give Nightcrawler a spin.

 

Jake Gyllenhaal is Louis Bloom, a desperate loner living in his car, who’s created an elaborate internal architecture of himself as focused entrepreneur. He’s just not sure what of. 

Fate has him stumble into a late night accident being filmed by an independent news photographer – whose key skill seems to be a willingness to cross lines and keep filming, no matter what. Bloom, a natural at unblinking fixation, quickly realizes, “I can do that.” He’s found his calling. Grabbing a cheap video camera and police scanner, he starts trolling nocturnal Los Angeles looking for the near aftermath of accidents – or crimes – anything where the whiff of violence and blood still lingers in the air. Fresh video can be a commodity – the more shocking the better. It gets ratings, and Bloom is obsessively determined to shoehorn a place for himself in the video underbelly of local TV news. He’s figured out the formula: footage is king – and there’s nothing he won’t do to get it.

 

Gyllenhaal reaches a whole other level here, disappearing into Louis Bloom. It’s a hypnotic, disturbing performance. He’s in virtually every scene, and it’s insane that he wasn’t nominated for an Oscar. He’s like a driven David Cronenberg character and Gyllenhaal has created one of the most unsettling and single-minded film characters in American film since De Niro gave us Travis Bickle. 

 

Writer Dan Gilroy (The Bourne Legacy, Real Steel) takes the director’s chair for the first time here, and knocks the cover off the ball. Gilroy’s family breathes movies – his brother Dan directed Michael Clayton, and his father is Frank D. Gilroy, Pulitzer Prize winner for The Subject Was Roses. Gilroy’s wife, Rene Russo, co-stars in the film as the local news producer that Bloom zeroes-in on. Conspiring with editor (brother) John Gilroy and the great cinematographer Robert Elswit (Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation) Gilroy serves up one of the most visually arresting and heart-pumping films I’ve seen in a while. Made for less than $10 million, Nightcrawler looks astonishing and establishes an unforgettable atmosphere of wee-hours stillness, where things happen in a heartbeat that very few are up and moving to witness. 

In this age of increasing hypnotic devotion to our screens and news entities that know blood entrances, Nightcrawler has plenty to say about our culture of unblinking voyeurism, about crime, law enforcement, and the increasingly blurry line between observer and participant. In a culture that has its sociopathic moments, is the unhinged loner still an aberration? Nightcrawler is unmissable cinema. You’re going to need a long hot shower afterwards, but it’s a stupendous modern film, that wears its tarnish well.