The Informers

Unlike traditional satires of the privileged, hedonistic and vacuous, which offer a glimmer of hope in escaping the cycle, Bret Easton Ellis's novels and adaptations take stolid, soulless people and provide them with enough self-awareness to come to this realization, only to feel all the more apathetic for it. Where Roger Avary presented this ideology with excess stylization and tonally incongruent moments of sagacity in The Rules of Attraction, and Mary Harron flat out mocked it in American Psycho, Gregor Jordan (Ned Kelly, Buffalo Soldiers) plays it straight with The Informers, keeping everything appropriately frosty, which is why it's so hard to get involved in the film. Within, infidelity, recreational sex and drug usage, and kidnapping interweave and connect both the rich and poor alike in early '80s Los Angeles. William (Billy Bob Thornton), a callous studio executive, bones Cheryl (Winona Ryder), a newscaster, on the side, when not trying to rekindle his marriage to Laura (Kim Basinger), a depressive socialite who's screwing young Martin (Austin Nichols), also on the side. Martin indulges in threesomes with friends Graham (Jon Foster) and Christie (Amber Heard), whose excessive indulgence are conveniently juxtaposed with news articles about the not yet named AIDS epidemic. Meanwhile, Les (Chris Isaak) takes his son (Lou Taylor Pucci) on a trip to find out if he's gay, while a rock star does drugs and a pair of lowlifes (played by Mickey Rourke and Brad Renfro) kidnap a kid. That's really it. We're never meant to like any of these people or engage with them on any level, as this film is essentially about bad going to worse, with hollow people living in a world of dread and despair. And without investment, The Informers proves to be little more than a minor voyeuristic whimsy with a handful of great performances. Included with the DVD is a brief "Making of," wherein everyone extols the virtues of Mr. Ellis, in addition to a commentary track with Gregor Jordan, Jon Foster and Lou Pucci.