If you took the vicious black-hearted media criticism of Ace in the Hole but made the film orbit around the violent, vacant presence that is Patrick Bateman, you might end up with something very close to Nightcrawler, which blends together black comedy, suspense, social commentary, and thriller elements to make a generally satisfying film that's not quite as great as it could be. Nightcrawler is the directorial debut of Dan Gilroy, who also wrote the film, and while Gilroy doesn't do much wrong, you can't help but think at times what someone like Michael Mann could do with the nighttime LA setting that fills so much of the film's running time. Gilroy's script, too, feels like it could use just a little more work; while what's there is still generally satisfying, I ended up almost feeling like it pulled its punches a little more than I expected, and that the film could have easily gone darker than it did (which, admittedly, is saying something, depending on the moments you focus on). But those are minor issues, and they merely mean that the film is quite good instead of great; that being said, the biggest thing this has going for it is the knockout performance by Jake Gyllenhaal as the strange, unhinged, rarely-blinking Lou, an obsessive young man who knows all the right things to say but never quite seems convincing or even human. Gilroy and Gyllenhaal toe the line beautifully, keeping Lou strange and off-putting but never letting him entirely leave us behind, and there's a lot of American Psycho to the way the film is as much an indictment of the system that allows him to succeed as it ever is of Lou himself. That also means, though, that Nightcrawler works better as a character study of Lou than as a screed on the state of media, and the more explicitly it hits its points, the more it loses some of its impact. But for all of that, it's still a gripping, uncomfortable, nicely intense film, and if the worst I can really say about it is that it's still really good, but I wish it was even better, that's still not much to complain about. And when you get a performance like this, or incredible moments like a late-film pursuit or the most uncomfortable date in recent memory, that only solidifies how well this really works, and how much I hope Gilroy keeps going and continues to hone his craft - I think there will definitely be more to come from him.
- Josh Mauthe
- Josh Mauthe
RSS Feed
