When it was announced that Bret Easton Ellis’s The Informers, a collection of interwoven short stories, would be made into a film, it was hard to know what to expect. The book is Ellis as we know him best: vapid, apathetic, sexually ambiguous, unabashedly adulterous with lots of sex and drugs and violence set in 1980s Los Angeles. A satire on the rich and the irrevocably screwed up.
Yet, unlike his novels, the stories in The Informers fail to follow any kind of linear plot, produce a conflict or arrive at any sort of resolution. Ellis’s writing chops more than make up for this in book form. The announcement that it would be translated to film, however, seemed disastrous.
Flash forward several years later to my couch where I eagerly sat down to watch the finished product. Clearly, my expectations were low, but Ellis HAD written the script and look… Billy Bob Thornton! Kim Bassinger! Winona Ryder! Mickey Rourke! There were too many big names for this to be a total loss. Then, within the first five minutes, I was proven tragically wrong.
Though Ellis had intended the film to be as satiric as the book and to make something “that the cast and writers were embarrassed of,” (which could have turned out equally disastrous but perhaps mildly humorous) the film took a much different, darker interpretation under the helm of director Gregor Jordan. The result is a complete shitstorm of random scenes from the book with no identifiable reason behind their assembly. If you have read the stories, you’ll have some concept of what’s going on, but if you haven’t you will be consistently stunned by its complete lack of plot and/or each scene’s relevance to another.
As for the acting, the hot young stars ran around naked while the veterans seem to have made it through the movie via the ingestion of whatever drug cocktail was consistent with their character: Billy Bob and Bassinger seemed completely sedated while Ryder and Brad Renfro twitched with the best of them. I literally fell asleep twice. If there was any cinematogrophy, acting or so-bad-it’s-good absurdity involved, it might justify its existence, alas there was none to be seen.
