Gregor Jordan's ""The Informers"" is a new window into the world that Bret Easton Ellis has been creating since the publication of ""Less Than Zero"" in 1985. It is a world of recurring and interchangeable characters, extravagant wealth and nihilistic depravity. This can be seen in the film adaptation of his novel ""American Psycho,"" which augments the text nicely, largely due to an impressive performance by Christian Bale, and has become a unique reference point for Ellis, who comments on the movie version in his quasi-autobiographical ""Lunar Park."" The film version of ""The Informers,"" however, has been ravaged in reviews thus far. Although it is certainly not a great film—it is mediocre—I feel that some of these critics might have missed the point.
""There's no plot, and it's hard to care about characters who themselves don't care,"" suggest some reviewers.
Well, it has never been particularly easy to care about the characters in Ellis' works, nor the circumstances of their lives. Almost without exception, his characters are wealthy, selfish, cruel and totally miserable. But the scariest (and most poignant) aspect of Ellis' work has always been the way that it urges readers to confront the actuality of existential despair. ""All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane,"" he writes in ""American Psycho,"" ""the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it, I have now surpassed ... My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone."" Thus, the debilitating and violent ennui that pervades his characters' lives is an important part of the point Ellis is making.
The truth about this film's mediocrity is simple: some scenes are better than others and the quality of the acting is inconsistent. ""The Informers"" captures some of the despair and emptiness that Ellis attempts to call our attention to, but it stumbles by overstating the case. Part of the problem might be that the actors appear too confident about what it is they are portraying. The great strength of Ellis' writing consists in the way it captures the ambiguity of its characters' boredom and emotional rot. His writing is disturbing because we recognize our own potential for this type of experience. ""The Informers,"" however, focuses more on the appalling outward cruelty of its characters than on the cognitive and existential architecture underlying this facade. The dialogue suffers from a lack of nuance as the actors fumble with an unwieldy and one-dimensional agglomeration of apathy and moral turpitude.
Some grainy images of Los Angeles in the eighties are interspersed between a few of the scenes, and could have become a nice point of reference if Jordan had actually done something interesting with them. But he doesn't seem to have made up his mind about what they signify, and his use of them is clumsy. The cityscape depicted in these shots hints at the potential (unrealized here) of the subject matter. The film's strongest dimension may be its visual reference points—the ""Flock of Seagulls"" haircuts, the beaches, the rooftop pools—but Jordan fails to take advantage of this strength by neglecting to allow the visual to play a greater role in the film's identity. Instead, it feels like a hasty and disorganized study of moral decline. ""The Informers"" could have been a nice addition to the Bret Easton Ellis catalogue if it had been handled with a bit more care.
Grade: BC
