The Informers, directed by Gregor Jordan and staring Mickey Rourke, Billy Bob Thornton and Winona Ryder, got trashed at its Sundance premier last week. I’m reserving judgement on the Bret Easton Ellis adaptation, but if this review from Salon is anything to go by, it’s not looking too good:
Some movies, as the saying goes, leave you feeling like you need to take a shower. This movie made me feel like I had just taken one. In prison. On my way to get the bad news at the STD clinic and attend my first 12-step meeting.
Every festival needs a designated disaster, a much-anticipated flick that fails on many levels at once, and “The Informers,” which presents early AIDS-era Los Angeles as a featureless landscape of narcissism and debauchery, fills the bill for Sundance 2009. Even the things in “The Informers” that are in some sense well done, like the tormented, off-center supporting roles played by Kim Basinger (a pill-popping Hollywood wife) and Chris Isaak (an alcoholic Hollywood dad), are in the service of such profound emptiness that they too become horrible.
Ellis’ stories were published in 1994 but set a decade earlier, so by the time we get to Gregor Jordan’s film (co-written by Ellis and Nicholas Jarecki) we’re looking at the ’80s from two removes, as if preserved in amber as a museum of soulless depravity. For those of you too young to have adult memories of the decade in question, a few points: 1) People sometimes had ordinary, reasonably polite conversations, even in the ’80s. Not absolutely all the talking was affectless mumbling, angry recriminations, drug deals or TV news about Ronald Reagan. 2) Sure, we did a lot of drugs and yes, the crime rate was higher. But a surprising number of people had to do stuff like work jobs, buy food at the grocery store and take care of their kids, however indifferently. 3) While evading the question of whether I ever had group sex in that decade, I will speak for other ’80s survivors in testifying that it didn’t happen every single day.
In his better prose, Ellis is able to enliven his vision of soulless yuppie America with a vein of dark allegorical humor and a surreal or grotesque joie de vivre. The stories of “The Informers,” in fact, feature a vampire and/or cannibal subplot that’s been ditched from the movie, leaving us with a murky and pretentious morass of pseudo-realistic, self-loathing characters who can only be distinguished from each other by their Billy Idol haircuts, or fake boobs, or lack thereof.
