The Informers

Vapid, pretty things flounce around a Roman-style mansion; Simple Minds croon about ‘new gold dreams’. Almost redundantly, a title informs us that this is Los Angeles, 1983. Haircut pursues haircut; a hanger-on is curtly rejected. A sports car flies in from out of nowhere, flattening a young god. Ten minutes later, no one gives a shit.Who could be responsible for such pitch-perfect shallowness? Bret Easton Ellis’s wobbly 1994 collection of LA vignettes has undergone some serious alterations; the above scene doesn’t even exist in this adaptation. Gregor Jordan may be the first director to resist flattering Ellis with depth (‘American Psycho’) or synth-driven sturm und drang (‘Less than Zero’). Instead, ‘The Informers’ flits from an unfaithful studio head (Billy Bob Thornton) to his estranged trophy wife (Kim Basinger) and troubled son (Jon Foster) with only the slightest interest in meaning. And isn’t that precisely right? We may not care about these cokeheads, but only rarely does Jordan fall into knee-jerk retribution.