Film Carew: Nightcrawler, Maps To The Stars, The Drop

NIGHTCRAWLER

“On TV, it looks so real,” Jake Gyllenhaal marvels, midway into Nightcrawler’s first act, staring at the LA-skyline backdrop that stretches out to the horizon’s infinity behind the chirping morning-TV twits and grave night-time anchors of his chosen local news-station. He’s walked in off the streets and into the dream-machine, eyes lit up as if he’s snuck inside the Chocolate Factory. Rene Russo, however, is no Willy Wonka. She’s the ultra-hard-ass production boss who runs a military-level operation, giving voice to every cynical suspicion you’ve ever had about television news: that stories in which well-off white suburbanites are injured by poor minorities are news-coverage porn; part of a consistent, created narrative of shameless fearmongering staged solely for the ratings. Russo and crew aren’t out to reflect reality, but author a story; news is just another form of reality-TV.

When Gyllenhaal comes in off the street, he’s like Aniello Arena’s hapless clown in Matteo Garrone’s artful indictment of aspirational television, Reality: a ridiculous dreamer who’s lost all touch with its title. Gyllenhaal, too, is chasing a dream, attempting to go from merely watching the news to capturing it; having traded in an impossibly fancy bicycle (obviously the product of a past obsession) for a police scanner and a camcorder, in hopes of providing the rubbernecking video of accident sites and crime scenes. With a mock-cheery disposition, firm handshake, radiant eye contact, and an endless reservoir of how-to-make-it-in-business jargon, Gyllenhaal is a model entry-level employee, a desperate freelancer on the hustle. He’s also a weird loner, an autodidact obsessed with the internet’s wealth of minutiae, and budding sociopath. Meaning: he’s perfect for the job.

Nightcrawler marks the droll directorial debut of Dan Gilroy, veteran screenwriter and brother of Bourne brains Tony. It’s a withering satire in the form of a psychological thriller, hitching its wagon to a memorable lead character —played, brilliantly, by a never-better Gyllenhaal — and following him ever further into the darkness, way past lines of ‘too far’. Heroes — hell, even anti-heroes — usually serve as a film’s moral compass; Gyllenhaal, here, is its amoral compass. Morality is represented by Kevin Rahm (Ted Chaough!), who plays the old-fashioned newshound appalled by the complete abandonment of journalistic ethics; which makes him, effectively, a starched shirt, a remnant of the past, an upholder of outdated values.

Gilroy introduces the standard thematic question of reporting-the-news movies — what’s ‘right’ to report — only to laugh it off. When Russo asks a suit from the station legal-department whether it’s OK to show a particularly disturbing piece of video footage that Gyllenhaal’s hauled in, she’s asked if she means legally OK. “No, morally,” Russo spits, mockingly, “Of course legally!”

In Gilroy’s horrified vision of contemporary Los Angeles — a town full of desperate freelancers, all willing to do anything to get a foot in the entertainment-industrial-complex door — morals have long ago been sacrificed in pursuit of the scoop. The ends always justify the means, even if that means, for Gyllenhaal, rearranging the bodies from a car crash to get a better shot, withholding video evidence from the police to gin up your negotiating price, or blackmailing your boss into having sex with you. In a less-audacious film, our anti-hero would eventually be punished for all the horrifying things he does. In Nightcrawler, he just gets a promotion.

MAPS TO THE STARS

David Cronenberg’s own Los Angeles satire, Maps To The Stars, seethes with bilious misanthropy and cruel comedy. Here, Hollywood is a place where a “disfigured schizophrenic” gets off the bus from backwater, Florida, and a week later is driving a convertible, instantly at-home in this rarefied realm of grotesque wealth and sociopathic privilege. A greek tragedy in the form of a caustic insider-comedy, Bruce Wagner’s script turns the lives of celebrity-culture’s modern-day Gods into fable for a self-consuming society; these bright-shining Stars inhabiting a realm of decadence and death.

Its denizens are haunted, often literally: Julianne Moore an ageing actress involved in a vindictive/victimised dialogue with the cruel ghost of her starlet-who-died-young mother, Sarah Gadon; Evan Bird a cunty tween superstar visited by the spectre of a girl he PR-opp visited on her deathbed; Mia Wasikowska the upwardly mobile schizophrenic whose burns are the scars of past building-to-the-big-reveal trauma. John Cusack plays a new-age soothsayer who presides over the trio — and a media empire — with his healing hands, spouting quasi-mystical jargon rich with self-help platitudes, 12-step philosophies, and self-mythologising horseshit.

Wagner’s righteously revolted, smirkingly namedropping script is full of familiar satirical tropes —Machiavellian momagers, Shylock agents, production power-plays — but Cronenberg, as is his way, literalises the horrors of Hollywood into a horror-film: the movie-biz a glittering necropolis, celebrity itself a veritable deathwish, this a grim picture of humanity on the brink of extinction.

THE DROP

“I just tend bawwwww,” Tom Hardy drawls, in a passable take on Brooklynese; the laughless, taciturn barman claiming he’s above the low-rent criminal milieu in which he mixes the drinks; the lad, obviously, doth protestin’ too much. Hardy’s sonorous, sing-song Welsh accent sat at the centre of Locke — it was, after all, a film whose drama consisted entirely of Hardy making phonecalls; the timbre of his voice as important as the content — but his accent, here, is just as symbolic. The Drop is a film that affects the authentic airs of small-timey goons in a rough-and-tumble Brooklyn neighbourhood, but fills its cast with European actors, whose accents range from passable (Hardy), to horrible-if-it’s-supposed-to-sound-local (Noomi Rapace, whose bizarre multi-national register remains unremarked-upon, here, just as it did in Prometheus), to a fantastic-part-of-a-menacing-turn (Matthias Schoenaerts, all coiled physicality).

The cast speaks of the filmmaker: Belgian auteur Michaël R. Roskam, who directed Schoenaerts in the eye-catching Bullhead, making his American debut. Comparisons to other, better crime-movies persist — even something as contemporaneous as Andrew Dominik’s brilliant Killing Them Softly — but, though it feels like a well-worn entry in a well-worn genre, The Drop isn’t absent of merit.

Adapted by Denis Lehane from his own short-story, it’s a fully formed world full of literary symbols (even if some are a little on-the-nose); its single-neighbourhood setting feeling closed-in, disconnected from the outside world. Lehane works the drama towards a climax whose flip-the-script reversal is expertly-timed and delivered with showstopper chutzpah. And, The Drop marks the final-ever film for James Gandolfini, whose hangdog air and desperate fatalism give the picture a haunted quality. Where, around him, foreign thesps try out their low-rent accents and method-acted takes on the tortured-criminal, Gandolfini sits calmly in the middle, the acme model, effortlessly bringing gravity and grace to each scene he’s in.