You Don't Know Jake

Movies: Nightcrawler

I have been in love with Jake Gyllenhaal as an actor and as a stone cold fox since I saw Donnie Darko in the early 2000's. At the time, Gyllenhaal often played the weird boy next door (and occasionally, the weird boy next door in a bubble). Over a decade later, Gyllenhaal has proven more than capable to branching out into a wide variety of roles, many of which have been increasingly gritty. What I love about Gyllenhaal is that he can play his masculinity softly or he can play it hard. He's equally believable as gentle cowboy Jack Twist in Brokeback Mountain or keyed up marine Anthony Swofford with an itchy trigger-finger in Jarhead. Whether he's going the buzz-cut macho route, or the shaggy-haired nerd route, Gyllenhaal has played a lot of good guys.

But now, in Dan Gilroy's shocking, sickening, and exciting Nightcrawler, Gyllenhaal plays something entirely different. He plays a character who is more of a shark or a vulture than a human. He plays a sociopath with no social skills, a predator without the sexy camouflage to hide his true intentions. His character, Louis Bloom, is many things--but he most certainly isn't a good guy.

Nightcrawler opens with Louis beating up a security guard and taking his watch after he gets caught trying to cut through a wire fence. The film offers no explanation as to where Louis came from and if he has a family or friends. The director alienates the audience from Louis from the word "go". Gyllenhaal's appearance further alienates us: the actor lost about 20 pounds for this role, and boy, does extreme thinness not suit him. His normally soulful eyes bug out crazily and his face is all  painful, sharp angles. His clothes don't fit, his hair is greasy. Boy is a hot mess is what I'm saying, but it works well for the character--a man who stays up all night, driven by his obsession with finding gory video footage of car accidents and crimes to sell to a low-rated news station.

Louis is trying to break into the seedy world of freelance crime journalism. He buys a police scanner and a camcorder and uses sheer audacity to get in real close to victims of auto accidents, muggings, and shoot-outs. Louis' complete lack of empathy and boundaries allow him get great shots of people dying, covered in blood. Where would Lou be able to sell such shocking footage? To a snuff video website? Nope. He sells his graphic videos to a news station that runs the stories on the morning news. As a fellow crime journalist (played by Bill Paxton in a fun little role) puts it, "if it bleeds, it leads".

After making a few hundred bucks, Lou is inspired to take it up a notch, which includes sexually blackmailing Nina (Rene Russo), a local TV news veteran who heads up the graveyard shift at a low-rated station. After propositioning Nina, he points out that while she can walk away, so can he, leaving her station gasping like a fish for the audience ratings his bloody videos once provided. Dude knows how to woo a lady. Lou also hires a naive assistant (Riz Ahmed) who is too green to understand the lengths Lou is willing to go to get great footage. For example, beating the ambulance to the scene of a car accident and moving an injured person around to get a better shot.

Part of the fun of Nightcrawler is seeing how far Louis will go to manipulate circumstances to serve his ambitions, and the climax of the film is extremely intense. My jaw was definitely hanging open. Nightcrawler has been compared to the films of David Cronenberg, and I was reminded of his film Crash (no, not the movie about how everyone is racist, the one about people with car crash fetishes) during a car chase scene that was almost sexual in its adrenaline-pumping intensity. While I've seen far more psychologically disturbing films than Nightcrawler, this movie was a lot more physically affecting (heart pounding, hands gripping the armrests) than any movie I've seen in a long time.

Nightcrawler isn't perfect. It would have been nice if the film stood on its own merits as a thriller, but director Gilroy insists on rubbing our noses in the message (news stations manipulate viewers with messages of racism and fear!). The film feels derivative at times--almost cliche. I've read reviews that compare Gyllenhaal's performance to Robert De Niro's in Taxi Driver (quite the compliment to Gyllenhaal!) and Rene Russo's performance to Faye Dunaway in Network. While the film is most definitely good, it's not really fresh or unique.

In spite of the quibbles I have about Nightcrawler, the sheer force of Gyllenhaal's un-glamourous, wacko performance really carries the movie. The actor strips away his beauty and his leading-man machismo to reveal a feral animal underneath. The excitement of watching an already talented actor uncover new depths is as much of a thrill as any grisly video footage Louis Bloom could find on the mean streets of L.A.

4 out of 5 stars