The Informers

The Informers (dir. Gregor Jordan) the latest big-screen adaptation of a Brett Easton Ellis book came out in the UK this weekend, to a thoroughly predictable critical drubbing. Phillip French of The Guardian tells us that it is ‘much inferior and far less interesting’ than Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, without troubling to say why. Presumably, given French’s stature as a cultural doyen, we are meant just to take his word for it. Other reviewers present more or less damning epithets, with similarly cloudy reasoning. This sort of reception has dogged not merely the movies of Ellis’s work, but also the books themselves, from Less Than Zero, through American Psycho, to Glamorama and Lunar Park. What is it about Ellis and his work that provokes such a polemical response?

The Informers, published in 1994, concerning the activities of a bunch of rich kids in L.A. in 1983, was originally a collection of short stories, but has now been transformed into a composite film with a screenplay by Ellis and collaborator Nicholas Jareki. The discrete narratives that make up the whole include a studio head’s doomed-to-fail reconciliation with his pill-popping ex-wife (played brilliantly by Billy Bob Thornton and Kim Basinger respectively); ruined British rock star Bryan Metro (Mel Raido) having a Dave Gahan moment; and the late Brad Renfro as a hotel doorman unwillingly embroiled in a kidnapping instigated by Peter (Mickey Rourke). The film’s main focus though is on glamorous trio Graham (Jon Foster), his girlfriend Christie (Amber Heard) and best-friend / friend with benefits (for both) Martin (Austin Nichols.) This being Ellis-country, the beautiful trio spend all their time doing pot, coke and each other with no particular discernment. Amorality abounds, or at least a serious lack of manners; Martin is sleeping not only with Graham and Christie, but also with Graham’s mother Laura (Basinger.) His lack of compunction about this state of affairs is studiedly nonchalant, while Christie is so unconcerned as to be motionless in virtually every scene where she isn’t indulging in group sex, or dancing to God-awful eighties New Wave in her underwear. Graham seems marginally more affected by all this, and a conversation with Martin in the final act where he ponders the difference between good and bad places him as the existential anti-hero of the piece, rather like a Camus in Ray Bans, or Kafka with a vintage convertible, a tan and a buff upper body. As this is a movie rather than a book, a comeuppance is clearly waiting in the wings, and it is Christie’s misfortune to suffer it. It is revealed at the end that she has contracted the AIDS virus. The party has well and truly come to an end.

For what it’s worth, I thought the film was excellently done. Billy Bob Thornton and Brad Renfro are particularly good, and even Chris Isaak pops up for a great turn as an alcoholic father struggling to reconcile with his teenage son. There is some fine photography of L.A.; its freeways, buildings, neons and graffiti a collage of alienation behind Graham’s glittering milieu. The denouement, where Christie’s affliction is made manifest, has been criticised by some, but it seemed to me affecting and sensitively handled.

The main beef that readers and film reviewers alike seem to have is with the characters: they are simply not ‘likeable’ enough. Antony Quinn, writing in The Independent, complains about ‘the absence of a single character I cared two hoots about,’ a complaint re-stated in many of the critiques. The difficulty this places with the writer, and especially with a writer like Ellis, who is concerned with shedding light on the murkier elements of human beings and their relationships, is considerable. Certainly, if writers throughout history had been compelled to populate their narratives with honest, upstanding folk, then we would have no Lolita, no Inferno, no Crime and Punishment, and a very slim Bible. This grasping for characters to ‘relate to’ may well demonstrate a paucity of imagination on the part of movie-goers and readers alike; after all, what is narrative for if not, in the words of George Eliot, to ‘extend our sympathies,’ or help us understand how it might be to be someone else? Even if we wouldn’t invite that person round for X-Factor and a curry. So the characters in The Informers seem cold, shallow and one-dimensional? Well, duh, isn’t that kind of the point? Isn’t that the very heart of darkness Ellis and Jordan are set on exposing? The Informers tells us something about alienation, about disconnect, about what happens when a recession is emotional rather than economic. It may not be a message we want to hear, but it’s a valid one.