Nightcrawler

Sometimes a movie lets you know how far we've come.  I recently rewatched "In and Out."  What was a charming and light comedy about the virtues of leaving the closet 20 years ago feels damn near pointless now, at least for the portion of the audience willing to watch Tom Selleck and Kevin Kline kiss.

"Nightcrawler" feels similarly dated, yet it just came out.  It took me a while to figure out why it feels like a film from 20 or 30 years ago.  Eventually I realized that it largely relates to the running time.  This movie is easily half an hour too long, not because it packs too much in but because it takes its time getting to the point.  We watch so many TV shows and movies now that we're extremely accustomed to cinematic language; we have no problem with shorthand techniques like jump cuts in the middle of a scene to abbreviate time, or cramming exposition into a few quick lines of dialogue.  Writer-director Dan Gilroy mostly eschews that, opting for a slow build to a climax that isn't quite as shocking as he thinks it is.

That gets to the second reason "Nightcrawler" feels dated: its heavy-handedness.  After a year which saw a new moral sophistication in Hollywood, this film is dully insistent on making, highlighting, and underlining its point.  This is a movie about local TV news footage that feels the need to have a character actually say, "If it bleeds, it leads."  There's a character at a TV news station whose entire job seems to be to frown worriedly at morally questionable footage.  Gilroy is aiming for a satire in the vein of "Network," but he doesn't have the verve of Paddy Chayefsky, and even that film got tiresome.

It's a shame, because the titular character is a fantastic creation, brought to terrifying life by Jake Gyllenhaal.  Lou Bloom is basically a sociopath spouting capitalistic bromides.  He delivers his messages with such openness and forthrightness that it's like he's shining a 50,000-watt bulb on the Protestant work ethic and showing how silly it can all be.  If the rest of the movie had had this sense of humor, we could have had "The Wolf of WKRP."