These days, it seems like a lot to ask for a movie to seriously tackle one topic with the requisite depth to provide satisfaction. On that criterion, “Nightcrawler” more than succeeds with its blistering critique of the media. Writer/director Dan Gilroy takes our present “if it bleeds, it leads” local news culture and absolutely skewers it, exposing the obvious immorality caused by its hunger for profits and ratings.
Jake Gyllenhaal’s Lou Bloom quickly moves from amateur to aesthete in his documentation of Los Angeles’ grisly, gory violence. With each new recording, he learns how to best appeal to Nina Romina, Rene Russo’s particularly desperate station manager at KWLA. She seeks footage akin to “a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut” in order to jolt the station’s jittery suburbanite watchers, and Lou is eager to provide that material irrespective of any sense of ethics or decency.
This savage criticism alone would satisfy, yet shockingly, Gilroy is not satisfied with setting his aim on just that target. Somehow, he manages to use “Nightcrawler” as a vessel for exploring a second major topic: extreme careerism. The media is also a business where it takes more than whetting a certain appetite to advance oneself. More than talent, it requires the marketing of oneself to a point where the line between self-promotion and shameless whoring disappears.
Though this Juvenalian satire happens to be moored to an excoriation of broadcast media, “Nightcrawler” could really be about anybody searching for lucrative employment in the business world today. Gilroy writes Lou Bloom as the desperate post-recessional job seeker followed logically (and sociopathically) into absurdity. Essentially, he gives us a Joel Osteen for the religion of capitalism, preaching the gospel according to LinkedIn.
Marshall and the Movies 
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