Author Bret Easton Ellis remains one of the key chroniclers of ’80s excess.
But the latest film to adapt one of his Reagan-era tales is nothing but excess.
“The Informers,” with a screenplay co-authored by Ellis, is a head scratcher of a period film, a movie teeming with beautiful people and rampant sexuality that still manages to bore us silly.
The film follows a series of storylines which wrap themselves around the decadent early ’80s. A gaggle of affluent young people gather, swap bodily fluids and fail to mourn the sudden loss of one of their peers.
A powerful studio exec (Billy Bob Thornton, looking tired, embarrassed or both) and his estranged wife (Kim Basinger) try reconnecting after a heart-breaking affair.
Mickey Rourke, sporting a goatee and a porkpie hat, glowers through his scenes as a kidnapper looking to make a fast buck. That storyline includes the final screen performance by the late Brad Renfro, a gifted young man whose last role, alas, is hardly his best.
And then there’s Chris Isaak, the crooner and sometimes actor, playing a dad obsessed with his son’s love life.
Vampires may be all the rage at the moment thanks to those tweeny “Twilight” films, but “The Informers” sucks the blood out of the source material’s undead elements. That renders the Rourke subplot almost incomprehensible.
The same might be said for the rest of the film, a poorly acted affair with one character uglier than the next.
The spectre of the looming AIDS crisis hangs over the sexually active ciphers in “The Informers,” but it’s hard to care who, if any, will be taken down by the deadly virus.
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Recently reflected upon the “Immediacy” of live-action story-telling in light of late & lamented Sara Conner Chronicles and the decision to advance the storyline to present day. Life on Mars also had problems. These were television series, mind you, but the issue of feature films being set in the past when informed by the present makes such features a challenge to market. Note T’s comment about the AIDS “crisis” informing the sexually-active characters, but in the context of the film’s story, AIDS was not as significant a factor back then.
None of this is to defend Ellis’ arguably too-set-in-the-80s writing/screen translation; it just notes why period pieces seem to have to be set far in the past to be watchable.
and I digressed….
~ Dagnabbitt