Nightcrawler

Remember when I said that when it comes to the Oscars the most daring nominations tend to come from the screenplay categories? Well, that certainly holds true for Nightcrawler, the story of a man who becomes an amateur crime scene recorder who begin to blur the lines between observing these horrific crimes and participating in, possible even engineering, them.

This is a film for which words like deranged or dark fail to truly grasp just how demented this thing is. Does the film judge him? I don’t know, it borrows from and feels a lot like Network, a film in which bad people don’t exactly lose out in the end. His schemes to become the top dog in his field, which is already populated with questionable people, and his actions are frequently dirty, we feel no remorse or sympathy with him, yet we still watch in a curious, transfixed state wondering what this terrible person will do next.

After questionable choices in films like Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and Love & Other Drugs, it’s nice to see Jake Gyllenhaal back in his element, namely playing dark, twisted characters. He doesn’t have the looks or energy to believably play a romantic comedy’s leading man or wholesomeness to lead a mega-blockbuster, no, he’s much better at strange character parts. His work in films like The Good Girl, Donnie Darko, and Zodiac have always shown that he has a knack for inhabiting obsessive characters veering toward un-likability. It’s a similar thing that happened with a young Johnny Depp, they seem to be much happy subverting their good looks and playing as far away from bland matinee idol as they possibly can.

Here Gyllenhaal is a gaunt wrath stalking the Los Angeles streets at the darkest hours of the night. A creature like this couldn’t exist in the daytime where his soulless nature would be too jarring. Gyllenhaal’s large eyes can express deep love and devotion like in Brokeback Mountain, or they can appear like the hollow pits of a sociopath like they are here, seemingly using the same muscles. This is another performance that demanded at spot at this year’s Oscars, but the disturbing and gross aftertaste of the character and performance, a testament to what Gyllenhaal achieves here, probably scared away too many voters.

A similar thing probably happened with Rene Russo’s solid work here. Maybe they thought she was too similar to Faye Dunaway in Network, and her character does feel like the prodigal daughter, but that didn’t stop them from rewarding Sandra Bullock for a performance similar to Julia Roberts’ winning role. Russo’s character is just as desperate as Gyllenhaal’s for success, but Russo’s still has some semblance of her humanity intact. She makes a deal with the devil to keep her job, and the film’s flirtations with American greed and succeeding in the modern era are hammered home.

Granted, parts of Nightcrawler work a little better than the rest, namely the two central performances, and the cinematography from Robert Elswit are operating at a more consistent level than some of the story’s twists and turns. This didn’t detract from me. Nightcrawler has a lot of ideas buzzing around in its skull, and if it stumbles a few times trying to reach its great climax, so be it. It’s a promising debut from Dan Gilroy as a director. I hope he re-teams with Gyllenhaal and gives us another surprising and rich piece of work.