"Nightcrawler" review

A dark chocolate with a hollow center

Martin Scorcese’s “Taxi Driver” is a heartrendingly tragic spiral into the black hole of loneliness, and Robert DeNiro’s career-making performance as war vet turned cabbie Travis Bickle epitomizes the emptiness of someone becoming emotionally disconnected from the rest of the world.  Travis is drowning under rising waves of impotence and rage, and this psychological abyss threatens to consume him.  “Nightcrawler” tries to capture this same, sinking sensation of impending doom, but the film's story, much like its main character, remains callow and superficial.

Jake Gyllenhaal’s stark-eyed turn as freelance news videographer Lou Bloom is effectively unsettling, but it lacks the emotional fragility that made Travis Bickle so sympathetic.  Nothing is revealed about Lou Bloom's background to make his actions credible and therefore somewhat understandable.  By the time the credits roll, any glimmers of humanity have been extinguished and Lou Bloom has become a monster. The problem is that we still don’t know why.  This absence of personal motivation is particularly glaring when Lou seeks a romance with Nina Romana, a producer for a bottom tier news channel.

Rene Russo’s performance is compellingly creepy, but unfortunately her character also remains hastily sketched.  Both Lou and Nina are horrible husks of human beings, so Lou’s attraction to Nina makes some twisted sense in that he would find her "quirks" familiar.  However, Lou's pursuit of Nina still feels more like a plot contrivance than a need driven by character desire.  Near the end, when Lou betrays his young assistant and receives no rebuke from Nina, their relationship transforms this sordid story into something truly loathsome: a serial killer soap opera.

“Nightcrawler” feels like a documentary about pornography in which the filmmaker was unable or unwilling to take a stand on whether porn is good or bad or something in between.  The film is sumptuously shot.  The wee small hours of LA's city streets are a lurid labyrinth of glitz and grime, yet very little of substance comes to light as Lou willingly submerges himself deeper into amoral darkness.  Without an origin for his impulses, Lou’s actions become increasingly incomprehensible, and watching this slow, deliberate descent soon fails to be exciting or even interesting.  Instead it just makes you want to take a shower.