Title: Informant

Opens: September 13, 2013

There’s a saying, “If you’re not liberal when you’re young, you have no heart. And if you’re not conservative when you’re older, you have no brains.” People do tend to become gradually more conservative as the years roll by, but there are extremes. Think of Italy’s Benito Mussolini, a socialist in his youth, a fascist when that served him politically. On the other hand, think of the retired Israeli information- gathering, terrorist fighting Shin Bet (in the service of safety) agents in Dror Moreh’s movie “The Gatekeepers.” Though these folks mirrored the hopes and dreams of the Israeli right, they moved considerably to the left in retirement as the Palestinian side made more sense to them.

In one of the more extreme incidents of recent years, one Brandon Darby, the “star” of Jamie Meltzer’s documentary “Informant,” went to post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans to search for a friend, and, after lending his hand and founding Common Ground to delivery water, food and medical attention won the respect of the locals. Feeling that the authorities were trying to stymie the organization, Darby, already with an anarchist mind-set, threw his lot in a group determined to disrupt the 2008 Republican Convention in St. Paul allegedly by nonviolent means. He was also asked to fund a Palestinian terrorist organization, which helped to cause Darby to reverse his hard left stance and go all the way to the other side.

There was at least one other set of incidents that compelled Darby to turn coat. According to at least one member of the radical group, Darby was ironically the guy who got the young people interested in throwing Molotov Cocktails. In this partially re-created film, Meltzer shows us how Molotov cocktails can be shopped for (separate ingredients in in Walmart), put together, and thrown at police cars. When Darby asked a fellow revolutionary “What if you kill a sleeping cop in his car,” he got the reply, more or less, “that’s the way it goes” or collateral damage. This woke Darby up to the possibilities not only of murder but of his spending no small number of years in jail.

So what’s a de-radicalized revolutionary to do? Darby, who had gone to Venezuela hoping to meet President Chavez and get funding for American domestic terrorism, did an about face and turned FBI informant. You’ve got to appreciate how this action would go over with his friends when his identity is outed, both among his fellow hard leftists and members of a church congregation in New Orleans who state that he sold out for thirty pieces of silver. (No money was involved.) His testimony led to jail terms for his colleagues David McKay and Bradley Crowder, prompting a series of death threats. To this day Darby sleeps with a rifle for a bedmate, refusing to move to an FBI safe house because “this is my home.”

Too much of the film, however, relies on extreme close-ups of Darby, who becomes the stereotypical “talking head”—the bane of so many docs. His soft answers to interview questions are peppered with a distracting barrage of “you know.” This doc, a portrait of Brandon Darby, follows up Kelly Duane and Katie Galloway’s 2011 film “Better This World,” which focuses on David McKay and Bradley Crowder’s plans for a peaceful protest at the 2008 Republican National Convention. Darby’s former friends accuse this hero of New Orleans of convincing the FBI that this peaceful demonstration was anything but. Ultimately we are left wondering about what really caused this far-left fellow to go to the other side as hard-and-fast motivations are subject to interpretation.

Unrated. 81 minutes © 2013 by Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online

Overall – B