There is little in life sadder to see than a film that thinks it has a great deal to say of a revelatory or profound nature, but doesn’t. And thus is it with FIERCE PEOPLE, which stretches metaphors beyond their inherent tensile strength in order to inform its audience that the rich are different. As though F. Scott Fitzgerald hadn’t covered that territory, and better, almost a century ago. Director Griffin Dunne, working from a screenplay by Dick Wittenborn, must have known this, ditto Wittenborn, and yet they approach this material as though it were all new, using variations on plotlines from Gatsby, among others, to reach the same conclusions. Aside from a few bits of window dressing to make it seem original, this is tired subject matter, handled indifferently, with nothing more to recommend it than another terrific Diane Lane performance with Donald Sutherland aiding and abetting.
The metaphor would be the tribe in South America about whom 16-year-old Finn (Anton Yelchin) is obsessed. Not so much for the intrinsic fascination for anthropology, as for the fact that is father, whom he has never met, is an expert on them. By way of introduction, he has sent his son reels of documentary footage of them and himself, which Finn watches constantly. Aside from the semi-frontal nudity of the native girls, it also offers an escape from the chaotic life in New York that his masseuse/drug addict/loose woman mother, Liz (Lane) leads. When the invitation comes from his father to join him for a summer of field work, Finn is delighted. Alas, a falling bookcase and a drug bust put the kaybosh on that. Instead he finds himself marooned on the 10-square-miles of rural New Jersey that constitute the fiefdom of one Ogden Osborne (Sutherland), the seventh richest man in the United States who has taken a fancy to Liz and installed her in a cottage on his estate as his on-call massage therapist while also making the drug charges disappear. There Finn will keep an anthropological journal about the extended family, friends, and assorted hangers-on in this hermetically sealed world where Ogden is absolute ruler and his relationship with Liz is the subject of endless speculation.
The first problem is that the film can’t quite make up his mind about whether he wants to make a black comedy or a trenchant drama. He ends up with neither as Yelchin bravely tries to strike the right chord with the immediate material, thereby failing to create a coherent character. He’s not without charm, but he’s as wretchedly muddled as the film. As for the rich folk, they are straight from the book of stock characters, including the daughter (Elizabeth Perkins) persistently overdressed and sipping from a soft drink can full of vodka, and her two children (Chris Evans and Kristen Stewart) who ooze patrician charm as they befriend Finn to prove their egalitarian principles.
Lane finds an emotional intensity to a woman trying to put her life back on track after years of winging it badly. There is a rich complexity to her performance, a nagging desperation mixed with cautious hope all held together by a ferocious love for her kid. It is especially when coping with material that is less than competent, and shining in spite of it, that she proves that she is one of the finest actors working today. Sutherland, too, with his silky, alpha-male presence brings the material up a notch or two.
Acid trips and Amazonian tribal folk lurking in New Jersey, the poacher and the artistic savant who unveils a mystery, play like the shopworn tricks they are. FIERCE PEOPLE sat on the shelf for two years before finally getting a release with 30 minutes or so trimmed from its original running time. It still feels endless as it gets lost early and never finds its way back.
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