INFORMANT (Jamie Meltzer). 81 minutes. Opens Friday (August 9). For venues and times, see listings. Rating: NN
Informant is a film about a liar that plays very much like a lie. In 2008, American activist Brandon Darby made headlines for diming on David McKay and Bradley Crowder, two Texas protesters arrested during the Republic National Convention for planning to use Molotov cocktails against state police vehicles. Darby, who ingratiated himself to members of McKay and Crowder’s circle, had been working for the FBI.
The whole narrative would be pretty simple – prominent politico betrays his comrades, etc – were it not for one very mitigating factor. According to McKay and Crowder, Darby actively radicalized them, encouraging them to build weapons, effectively entrapping them in his role of agent provocateur.
Previously profiled in Katie Galloway and Kelly Duane de la Vega’s doc Better This World, Darby here gives in-depth interviews that distinguishes the film. He even takes part in carefully constructed re-enactments that give it an acutely dramatic, Errol Morris quality.
The problem is that director Jamie Meltzer doesn’t seem to know what to make of Darby. It’s a lazy human-interest doc in which Meltzer just seems to find Darby fascinating, his curiosity scanning as sympathy.
Not until the film’s rushed last leg, which tracks Darby’s recuperation by the Tea Party movement, do the knives really come out and Darby’s character becomes seriously jeopardized. But even these threads are left dangling, with only hints that Darby is more than just an unreliable narrator – he may be an actual sociopath.
For any viewer familiar with the case, Meltzer’s glossy, glossed-over approach is frustrating. For anyone unfamiliar, it’s downright irresponsible.
