“The Informers” is about dread, despair and doom, and its characters are almost all about to be hit with more reasons for dread and despair, and a shared doom. It takes place in the Los Angeles show-biz drug subculture of 1983, when AIDS didn’t have a name and cocaine looked like the answer to something. It demonstrates the eerie ways that music and movies connect people from vastly different lives in a subterranean way where desire is the common currency. What do they desire? Drugs, sex, power, wealth and fame or its proximity. These things have made their lives hollow daily punishments, treatable only by oblivion. One character, in a moment of desperate need, says, “All I want is someone to tell me what is good, and someone to tell me what is bad.” Hemingway told him, if he had been listening: “What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.” As nearly as I can recall, none of the characters ever feels happy. They’re all pitiful, some are evil, the rest are helpless. There may be a few who are bystanders, like the anchorwoman, but even she’s guilty of sleeping with a married studio chief primarily because of who he is. Almost everyone in this film is connected by sexual partners, sometimes in ways they never suspect. The film, based on work by Bret Easton Ellis, takes place in his usual world of hedonistic excess. It tells many interweaving stories and is skillfully cast with actors who embody precisely what their roles call for.
| Original title: | The Informers |
|---|---|
| Director: | Gregor Jordan |
| Cast: | Amber Heard, Jon Foster, Mickey Rourke, Billy Bob Thornton, Kim Basinger, Winona Ryder |
| Production year: | 2008 |
| Genre: | Crime, Drama, Thriller |
| Runtime: | 1h, 38m |
| Cinema release: |
