Fierce People

Movie Fierce People

Sixteen-year-old Finn Earl (Anton Yelchin) is supposed to spend the summer in the Amazon, helping his anthropologist father, whom he's never met, study the Ishkanani tribe. But instead of getting a passport, he gets busted for buying coke for his addict mother, Liz (Diane Lane), and takes the rap himself. So Finn goes off on a very different kind of adventure instead: spending the summer at the massive New Jersey estate of the wealthy and powerful Ogden C. Osborne (Donald Sutherland), one of his mother's massage clients. While his mother fights to remain sober there, Finn falls in with Osborne's spoiled-rotten grandchildren, including Bryce (Chris Evans) and Maya (Kristen Stewart); the latter takes an immediate romantic interest in him. Despite the fun Finn's having--getting involved in drinking, smoking pot, and experimenting for the first time with sex--he identifies more with the maid, Jilly (Paz de la Huerta), than with the rich kids. And when he gets taken under Osborne's wing, danger lurks as family secrets start rising to the surface.
Griffin Dunne directs FIERCE PEOPLE with a firm hand, mixing in scenes from Finn's father's documentaries that evoke what is happening within the Osborne tribe itself. The ensemble cast also includes Elizabeth Perkins as Osborne's snobby daughter, Christopher Shyer as a doctor who quickly develops a thing for Liz, and Garry Chalk as the blowhard McCallum. Based on the book by Dirk Wittenborn, who also wrote the screenplay and appears in the film as Fox Blanchard, FIERCE PEOPLE is a bittersweet look at classism in the United States, set in 1980 but relevant to the separation between the rich and the poor in any era.