Weekly Review -- Empty interiors

The Informers (2009) -- Bret Easton Ellis is the type of author that generally polarizes readers all around the map with his biting dissections of isolation, greed, materialism, hedonism, sexuality, values and beliefs. The same is generally true of movie adaptations of his works. Mary Harron played with dark humor in her American Psycho adaptation, while Roger Avary's Rules of Attraction examined the jaded wistfulness and bored cynicism of 1980s' privileged youth with flashy, regretful glee. However, Gregor Jordan's The Informers is a couple of notches lower on the effectiveness scale, mostly due to its lack of creative focus on thematic resonance. The story concerns a group of 1983 Los Angeles residents, all involved in one way or another with the suck-you-dry world of show business. The group includes rich kid Graham (Jon Foster), his cheating movie producer father William (Billy Bob Thornton), pill-popping mother Laura (Kim Basinger), promiscuous girlfriend Christie (Amber Heard) and best friend and occasional lover Martin (Austin Nichols). As is habitual for Ellis's works, all of the characters live life with no thought of tomorrow, lost in the drug-fuelled chaos of meaningless sex, unforgivable crime and foggy human connections. The narrative is nestled in the context of the emerging AIDS epidemic, as well as the ever-potent and intoxicating Hollywood scene. All the ingredients are there for a drama that crosses over into serious satire of fame and its excesses, yet Jordan seems content to tell the story in a linear fashion, without using techniques that might elevate it from an unswerving narrative to a multi-layered tale of woe amid riches. Ellis's works are shrewdly unconventional; one should not try to box them into a standard of any kind, nor should one try telling them without finding overtones of bitter humor shading all of the story elements, and Jordan does find some of them using his camerawork and metaphorical details, such as the black-and-white music video that subtly places a sexually charged scene into a context of fleeting zeitgeist. The most poignant scenes are those involving an elusive stillness, a calm before yet another emotional storm; a calm that we know is deceitful, because we are well aware that Ellis's characters' soulless voracity prevents them from ever finding peace. The last scene took my breath away, both in its emotional significance and its stark aesthetic, and it suggests that Jordan might have needed only a few different artistic choices to present an extraordinary film. The acting is the most captivating part of The Informers, with most of the cast getting a chance to play out of character. Thornton is at his weaselly best as the principal character's father, while Winona Ryder shines as a reporter caught up in some unfinished business. However, it is Chris Isaak who is a revelation as a neglectful playboy father, and whose character's exchanges with his son border on highly disturbing. All in all, the movie is a miss, when it could have been a clear hit. The Informers has potential, but it needed to be slightly more controversial, slightly more cynical in the face of its obvious absurdity, in order to get to its boiling point.

6/10