Nightcrawler

Dan Gilroy's Nightcrawler (2014) is an entertaining neo-noir, beautifully crafted and, indeed, machine-tooled to a high gloss.  The film is fundamentally divided:  on one level, the movie makers seem to have aimed for a raw blast of gritty urban melodrama.  This aspect of Nightcrawler conflicts with the extremely beautiful, even lyrical, photography of Los Angeles at night, the work of the great cameraman Frederick Elswit -- eerily empty lanes curve and arc under the shimmer of halogen lights, palm trees hover in the twilight, gas stations and convenience stores glisten in the night like gems on black velvet.  The curious dichotomy between raw immediacy and high-sheen glamor is reflected in the titular "nightcrawler" -- a sort of pirate with a camcorder and police scanner who trolls the night city recording images of murder and accidental death.  As played by Jake Gyllenhaal, the "stringer" Lewis Boom, is a homicidal psychopath who lectures his hapless employee ceaselessly on entrepreneurship, proper etiquette at work, and career building -- he's like Scorsese's infamous taxi driver, Travis Bickel crossed with Dale Carnegie.  Boom is a loner eking out a living by petty crime (he chops down cyclone fences and sells them to metal merchants).  One night, he happens on an accident scene and observes stringers with camcorders recording the gory action so that it can be peddled to local TV stations.  Boom steals a bicycle, converts it to cash, and buys the requisite camcorder and police scanner.  He acquires an "intern," played by Riz Ahmed, and using the "Maps" feature on his phone races to accidents and crime scenes. Boom is aggressive and fearless; he's also not afraid to trespass, entering apartments where shootings have occurred to get the gruesome goods that he markets to the local Tv-network affiliates.  A vestigial subplot involves a female news producer, down on her luck and desperate to enhance her show's ratings -- she haggles with Boom over footage that he produces and encourages him to focus on stories that can be used, Fox-news style, to terrorize White middle-class viewers:  home invasions and car-jackings in prosperous neighborhoods.  Boom is attracted to the lady-producer's faded glamor (she was probably once "on-air" talent) and, although she is twice his age, unctuously tries to seduce her.  All of the secondary characters are underwritten, basically caricatures that we have seen in other movies -- the lady news producer is similar, for instance, to the Faye Dunaway character in Network -- and the film seems stripped down to its essential outline.  It is like a fifties film noir but without the plot complications or wealth of effectively portrayed secondary characters. But the movie is exciting with a realistic and thrilling police chase for a climax and some of the satire has a cutting edge -- particularly effective is a scene showing how the news producer pruriently amps up the paranoia in the reporting to frighten her target-demographic.  As the film progresses, the amoral Boom begins to manipulate the scenes of the calamities that he films; like Matthew Arnold on a Civil War battlefield, he drags the corpses around to get better shots.  And from this sort of intervention, it's a short step from recording disasters to, in fact, designing and orchestrating the calamities that he films.  The movie is ice-cold and cynical; it projects a glacial sense of outrage, but, of course, the viewer is complicit in the crimes that the movie documents -- after all, we are the consumers for the gory news footage that Lewis Boom and his ilk produce.  Gyllenhaal is superlatively creepy in the title role; Rene Russo is effective as the callous news producer.  And, of course, LA stuns in its star turn as the sinister, glittering City of Night.