Nightcrawler (2014)

If this were about the beloved X-Man, I would have seen it in a theater. If it were about an earthworm, I might still have seen it earlier. But for all its popularity, I must not have liked what I'd gleaned about it, or I would have put it on my Netflix list. Instead, it was the first halfway-promising result I hadn't watched when I browsed on another account.

Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal) has been a sometimes violent sneak thief, but he wants a more legitimate job. At the scene of a car crash, he decides to make videos of newsworthy nighttime incidents and sell them to a struggling L.A. news station. He gets too close for the comfort of emergency personnel, but morning news director Nina Romina (Rene Russo) craves such sensational footage. Lou enlists desperate intern Rick (Riz Ahmed) to help navigate to addresses mentioned on scanned police radio signals. In his business ambitions, Lou has so little regard for laws and ethics that he might have done less damage as a thief.

We don't see a whole lot of violence in progress, and when we do, it's usually from a significant distance. Mostly we see bloody bodies on the ground. That and profuse swearing (usually not by Lou, oddly enough) account for the R rating.

This is no morality play: Lou does not improve his behavior, regret any sins, or pay a price. He clearly cares only about himself, the biggest misanthrope this side of Patrick Bateman. He even tries (successfully?) to blackmail Nina into sex. At none of the 117 minutes did I not want to punch his face.

No, the real lesson is in the slight satirical exaggeration of "If it bleeds, it leads." Lou is a bad influence on co-workers, most evidently Nina, who barely has any fear of lawsuits despite a shaky career for someone that high up the ladder. Of course, she already had skewed priorities for what stories to broadcast: not the most important but the ones viewers would most likely talk about. I imagine that the pattern continues in most news sources to this day.

The other value to this movie is in general education on industry matters. I had not heard the term "stringers" in reference to freelance photojournalists. Nor had I considered how they could be a different sort of ambulance chaser.

The Academy Awards may have nominated Nightcrawler for best original screenplay, but I found it hard to sit through. I made the mistake of expecting more positive development. If you aren't up for both literal and figurative darkness, you'd better pass.