Gilroy: Nightcrawler (2014)

A kind of spiritual sequel to End of Watch, Dan Gilroy’s debut feature stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Louis Bloom, a petty criminal who turns his hand to freelance accident and crime scene photography to satisfy his yearnings to become a member of the professional class. Despite being set in Los Angeles, it’s clearly modelled on Michael Mann’s Thief – there’s the same procedural coldness, the same aversion to natural light, the same gravitation towards lurid, tungsten hues and, above all, the same disinterest in anything outside Bloom’s professional existence, both on the part of Gilroy and Bloom himself, as his mentor, news director Nina Romina (Rene Russo), quickly realises. However, the nature of what it means to be a professional has changed – or perhaps just clarified – somewhat over the last thirty years, with the result that for every solitary, hardboiled, nocturnal streetscape that Bloom traverses, there’s a wry, queasy lesson to be learned about bargaining power, career goals, performance reviews, systems analysis and pretty much every other piece of corporate nomenclature Bloom can find online, thanks in part to his relationship with his own protégé, played by Riz Ahmed. At his best in the mobile, shifting zones where car accidents and crime scenes overlap, and urban crime starts to spill into suburban lives – he’s almost singlehandedy responsible for a wave of carjacking hysteria – Bloom doesn’t really feel like a character so much as a mouthpiece for the internet itself, which is where he spends all his time when he’s not out on the road. In that sense, it often plays like a brilliant study in how Google might sound if it was a person – perkily informative but also inhumanly oblivious to anything but its own informational primacy, which is what Bloom is ultimately interested in stealing and claiming as his own. As a result, the film’s fascinated with the hushed horror and breathless anticipation of arriving at accidents before emergency services come on the scene, along with sites that are in the process of becoming crime scenes, the very moments at which crime scenes are activated. Most of the film feels poised at that distended moment, which balloons and balloons until Bloom finds himself shooting short features for Nina, manipulating and orchestrating crime scenes as if this were the last real avenue for an aspiring Los Angeles auteur. Of course, there’s a message in there about how people in the media deceive us, but what’s curious is that these film fragments seem to coalesce almost despite Bloom, to the point where it feels like there’s no real distinction between the spaces he’s shooting and the venues where they might be watched, no real distinction between cinematic and non-cinematic infrastructure, no home that hasn’t already been invaded, not unlike the endless feedback loops of John Frankenheimer’s 52 Pick-Up, with Rene Russo channelling Ann-Margret in particular. And that’s exactly the hysteria so precious to primetime news, which, in Gilroy’s hands, suddenly feels like the cutting-edge of post-cinematic media, a strange and breathless brand of wonder hiding in plan sight, amongst even or especially the most conservative tabloid agendas.

Comments

[Gars]

Yes he could be a Google stand-in. Or an aspergers (like Bobby Fischer, which is the actor's interpretation from the script - the source of all the performance decisions.)

Or even a hikikomori who lacks social grace and interpersonal skills, because of his long-term social isolation essentially due to paucity of job prospects thus his total immersion in the internet. A millennial creature in the most extreme way, for these times.