Fierce People (2007)
Rated: R [See Full Rating] for language, drug use, sexuality/nudity and some violence.
Runtime: 1 hr 52 mins
Theatrical Release: Sep 7, 2007 Limited
Synopsis: A coming-of-age story about the perils of privilege, Lions Gate Films’ FIERCE PEOPLE examines the deceit and betrayal that erupts when a working-class mother and her son move to a wealthy “country club” suburb where social climbing is a blood sport. Starring Oscar ® nominee Diane Lane... A coming-of-age story about the perils of privilege, Lions Gate Films’ FIERCE PEOPLE examines the deceit and betrayal that erupts when a working-class mother and her son move to a wealthy “country club” suburb where social climbing is a blood sport. Starring Oscar ® nominee Diane Lane (UNFAITHFUL, UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN), Donald Sutherland (COLD MOUNTAIN, THE ITALIAN JOB) and Anton Yelchin (HEARTS IN ATLANTIS), FIERCE PEOPLE is directed by Griffin Dunne and written by Dirk Wittenborn, who adapted the screenplay from his novel. Trapped in his mother’s Lower East Side apartment, sixteen-year-old Finn (Anton Yelchin) wants nothing more than to escape New York and spend the summer in South America studying the Iskanani Indians, or “Fierce People,” with the anthropologist father he’s never met. But Finn’s dreams are shattered when he is arrested in a desperate effort to help his drug-dependent mother, Liz (Diane Lane), who scrapes by working as a masseuse. Determined to get their lives back on track, Liz moves the two of them into a guesthouse on the vast country estate of her ex-client, the aging aristocratic billionaire, Ogden C. Osbourne (Donald Sutherland). In Osbourne’s close world of privilege and power, Finn and Liz encounter a tribe fiercer and more mysterious than anything they might find in the South American jungle: the super rich. While Liz battles her substance abuse and struggles to win back her son’s love and trust, Finn falls in love with Osbourne’s beautiful granddaughter, Maya (Kristin Stewart), befriends her charismatic older brother, Bryce (Chris Evans), and even wins the favor of Osbourne himself. But when a shocking act of violence shatters Finn’s ascension within the Osbourne clan, the golden promises of this lush world quickly sour. And both Finn and Liz, caught in a harrowing struggle for their dignity, discover that membership always comes at a price… Contrasting the mores of high society with the blunt savagery of primitive tribes, FIERCE PEOPLE takes an inside look at the upper classes, examining the darkness that lurks beneath the surface of good manners. Sporting a biting wit, and featuring charismatic performances from Diane Lane and Donald Sutherland, this unflinching drama exposes the trappings of wealth and privilege, and their overwhelming power to both seduce and corrupt. --© Lionsgate [More]
Genre: Dramas
Starring: Diane Lane, Anton Yelchin, Donald Sutherland, Kristen Stewart, Christopher Shyer
Screenwriter: Dirk Wittenborn
Producer: Nick Wechsler, Keith Addis
Composer: Nick Laird-Clowes
DVD Info
Release:
Feb 5, 2008
DVD Features:
- Keep Case
- Widescreen
Audio:
- Dolby Digital 5.1 - English
- Dolby Digital 2.0 - English
- Subtitled - English, Spanish
Additional Release Material:
- Audio Commentary - Griffin Dunne - Director
- Deleted Scenes
- Featurette - "Breaking Down the Tribe"
Buy It On DVD
Reviews
...the movie's abrupt (and downright graceless) transformation from jaunty comedy to heavy-handed drama strips the proceedings of any momentum it may have had...
With a screechingly affected voice (think Nicholson mixed with a sick Chihuahua), Yelchin is all tiring, syllable-pulling raw nerve here; a blinding pitch that holds the film back from needed dramatic expression.
Director Griffin Dunne, working from Dirk Wittenborn's adaptation of his own novel, pounds away at the analogy between the inherent cruelty of the tribal rituals of the Iskanani and those of the well-heeled.
On balance, it's a movie worth seeing with its artistic inserts, appropriate soundtrack and organic performances.
Watching the idle rich toy with people can only go so far, then you want more depth and this doesn't have it.
Miscalculated at every level, it's a vacant drama full of ineptly drawn characters.
There are lots of potent things floating around in it -- sexual initiation, drugs, fantasy-land wealth, brute violence, primitive rituals, Diane Lane and Donald Sutherland -- but the mix just sits there without producing any notable reactions.
A buoyant coming-of-age adventure welded to an amiable wealth fantasy.
After a promising start, Griffin Dunne's film bogs down and simply turns into a predictable mish-mash of a movie that is shrill and heavy-handed and totally trite.
The film is way too banal to raise any questions of its own. [Director] Dunne, for his part, doesn't conjure up any kind of inspired visual atmosphere or compelling psychological tension. Nothing is as funny, touching, true, or sad as it should be.
Dunne's messy, unpredictable, yet weirdly vital movie veers from one extreme to another without finding a consistent tone, but Sutherland never strikes a wrong note.
Fierce People is no ordinary dud. This seedy soap opera is the most outlandish, campy romp through the mud since Showgirls.
The laughs suddenly cease after a brutal rape sequence, and Dunne desperately and vainly tries to re-work the remainder of the movie as a metaphysical coming-of-age story.
The idea that rich people are an alien tribe is just one of many that get lost in Wittenborn’s distracted script.
Overplotting and a particularly ugly turn make this adaptation of Dirk Wittenborn's novel less a meditation on how the rich are different than a bland coming-of-age procedural.
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
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