Review: Informant
At the beginning of Jamie Meltzer’s Informant, ex–militant anarchist Brandon Darby is instructed to look straight into the camera. He hesitates, clearly uncomfortable with being filmed, then quips: “It’s not looking straight at me.” His unease is understandable: Informant relates Darby’s shocking political about-face. After years as an avowed radical, Brandon shocked his activist peers by admitting to working with FBI agents to infiltrate and expose potential anti-government plots.
Informant adeptly combines archival footage with current interviews to provide two contradictory portraits of one man. Meanwhile, Darby’s words are punctuated by those of his former friends and colleagues, who are quick to condemn his as a rat, a traitor, or an outright liar. Early in the film there’s plenty of Darby the activist, grandstanding and passionately spouting radical leftist politics. We hear about his extensive efforts to rebuild the Lower Ninth Ward following Hurricane Katrina with Common Ground Relief, an organization he helped co-found. Yet while Meltzer offers some devastating images of clothes hanging in trees and abandoned cars around the half-submerged city, he often relies too strongly on somewhat heavy-handed reenactments so common in politicized documentaries. One sequence in particular—a Molotov cocktail being lit and thrown in slow motion and then reversed—is particularly excessive.
Today, Darby sleeps with a shotgun on his bed and refuses to move out of his Austin home despite direct threats to his safety. Meltzer seems to believe that his subject had good intentions, but there’s the lingering notion that Darby has lost his way: when the onetime radical speaks to a congregation in a church he helped rebuild in New Orleans, he’s undeniably square in his tucked-in shirt and dress pants. Regardless, Darby feels he is using his experience as an anarchist for the common good, and seems confident that he’s the best man for the job.
While Informant is Darby’s story, he’s outnumbered by a multitude of detractors. They insist that Brandon has a flair for the dramatic, an impulse to assign profound significance to inconsequential events. Darby meanwhile can’t seem to get much of a word in edgewise. He often seems unsure of what to say, calling for breaks or trailing off before finishing a story. As the film progresses, Brandon gradually morphs into a kind of hyperbolic reactionary, so fearful of worst-case scenarios that he will interpret a supposedly satiric YouTube video as an immediate threat to national security. Functioning with a combination of nervous energy and hubristic self-importance, he’s conflicted about some of his choices, but clearly revels in his status as an undercover operative. The final image of Darby casually sipping from an FBI mug can be viewed only with irony or contempt.
However, the film doesn’t entirely minimize Darby’s anxieties. Meltzer understands that there are dangerous people out there, and that the digital age allows for conspiracies to be plotted with greater anonymity. But at the core of Informant is the division between word and deed, the idea that a promise of action does not guarantee action itself. Some people just like to talk big, and Brandon Darby might be one of them.
