The Informers

SEPARATION ANXIETY Basinger and Thornton try to patch things up.

This slick Bret Easton Ellis ensemble piece squanders a perfectly good opportunity to reunite the stars of 9 1/2 Weeks, since Rourke’s and Basinger’s characters never meet. Basinger plays a wealthy but despondent housewife who’s fucking one of her son’s like-aged friends and pondering whether to get back together with her movie-producer husband (Thornton); Rourke plays a hardened ex-convict who bullies his hotel-doorman nephew (the late Renfro) into helping with a poorly planned kidnapping. Between them lies Los Angeles, A.D. 1983—a vast terrain of epic airheadedness where coke runs like water, three-ways are de rigueur, everyone dresses for the runway and mid-Atlantic accents are the height of coolness.

The combination of Renfro, kidnapping, dirty-talking parents and lovingly photographed bodies makes this the most Larry Clark–like film yet to be adapted from Ellis’s fiction (this time by the author himself, with Nicholas Jarecki). It revels in the characters’ nubility, only to scorn them later. But calling out these zombies for debauchery is about as challenging as accusing Paris Hilton of partying too hard. Livelier than Jordan’s inert satire Buffalo Soldiers (2001), the movie is strictly guilty-pleasure turf; you can roll your eyes at the mindless sensationalism, but you may still come out humming Flock of Seagulls.

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