Watching Nightcrawler,
as disturbing as it is, is like watch a slow motion car crash; you can’t take
your eyes off it. In that sense the film itself is much like the darker uncontrollable
side of human nature it tries to illuminate.
A self-absorbed loner, Louis Bloom, roams the deserted nocturnal
Los Angeles streets for opportunities to make money from anything he
can put his hands on. He is the Travis Bickle of the 21st Century
working the sprawling urban West coast. There is nothing he won’t do or place
he won’t go to succeed in life.
Louis, (Jake Gyllenhaal), unlike Travis from Taxi Driver (1976), has a gift for corporate
gab and is completely self-educated on the home computer. But like Travis
Bickle he also has a disdain for people and an obsession for one special woman in
the corporate world he desires to be a part of, who may just be as unscrupulous as he is.
With an over-developed sense of purpose and a
single-minded focus and drive, he has learned quickly what it takes to be a
successful entrepreneur and is fast-tracking himself into the highly
competitive world of gathering on-the-scene disaster video footage.
But Louis is no ordinary Videographer, he is a scavenger, a
lean cutthroat hunter of bloody victims of shootings, stabbings and drunk
drivers and he gets paid extremely well by the ever ravenous public appetite
for tragic and graphic violent stories as they happen.
Tabloid media coverage of violence in the streets is to
today’s viewers what the gladiatorial games must have been to Romans, and our
appetite for graphic reality is still as strong as ever.
Tracking police communications from his small used car with
camera in hand, we get to see how Louis progresses from naïve amateur to
ruthless capitalist. His skills quickly increase along with his ambitions as he
learns from the other night crawlers around him and tries to out maneuver them
to increase his own value and his video’s desirability.
Soon he has a television news director, played by Rene
Russo, salivating and eating out of his hands. But corporate lingo spouting Louis,
who has taken entrepreneurialism to a whole new level, has even bigger plans
than she can imagine.
Jake Gyllenhaal is mesmerizing and completely convincing as
the creepy amoral Louis Bloom, having lost weight for the role to emulate the
desperate coyote-like presence of the character.
As we watch this night urchin break every moral code, we as a
society are outraged but at the same time enable him to continue. It’s strange as
we try to decide who is worse; the criminal on the street causing pain and
suffering, the media manipulation by the broadcasters or the scavenger who lurks unnoticed
among us making a living off the misery of others?
He’s not the kind of person you’d want to know or work for.
He lives on the edge of our moral boundaries but at the same time he serves our human desire to see the worst in us during our worst moments. As Louis proudly states
with a sincere smile on his face, “I'd like to think that if you’re seeing me, you
are having the worst day of your life.”
JP
3 comments:
Sounds like the sort of movie that's hard to watch, and hard not to! I really have to hand it to these writers who manage to construct such complex characters!
I've seen the trailer for this movie but your review gave me a much better sense of what the movie is actually about. Sounds fascinating and yet also pretty depressing - it's like you know these people exist but why invite them into your head?
This review has given me much clear idea about the movie. As you are telling that movie is disturbing and its just like keeping in view the bad things about our self.
When ever I watch such movies I think how writers think about such movies or scenes.
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