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By Robert J. Crawford (Balmette Talloires, France)
This film fails to live up to its potential. In the beginning, you see a vivid portrait of a life unravelling in addiction and emotional neglect. The son, Finn, was planing to work with his father (whose only contact with him is through the films he made) in the Amazon rain forest, with the "fierce people" of the title. Unfortunately, while scoring coke for his mom, he is busted and cannot go. This is a shock to his mother, who decides to turn her life around and become a better mother.
They wind up, improbably, in the massive estate of Osborne, many of whose children and grandchildren have the run of his 10-mile square New Jersey estate. Beyond the mother's sobering up and quitting coke, played wonderfully by Lane, there are some very interesting subplots: Finn develops a wonderfully believable relationship with Osborne, who mentors him in some vital life lessons. Sutherland was never better, as a quirky and warm man who cares and yet is also very tough. Ruler of the roost, he hopes to create a better world somehow, in his private kingdom. Finn also studies his father's films, which provide a wonderful sub-narrative to his observations of the huge family culture he is observing. Finally, he mingles with the locals and to a degree is accepted by them, though remains fully aware that he can never be one of them.
Unfortunately, the film unravels with Finn's relationships with Osborne's grandchildren. He finds a beautiful, sensitive girl of course, and their path is ridiculously predictable, if occasionally poignant. While Kristen Stewart succeeds in evoking some of the psychological trouble that underlies her character, the character is essentially a cute stick figure. Finn also becomes friends with the outgoing though mysterious grandson, whose evolution is also a bit far fetched and laughably melodramatic. Then the plot thickens in a ruinous direction, which I do not want to spoil for others, and ends sentimentally if tragically. If the film had ended 2/3 of the way through, it would easily have gotten 5 stars.
Recommended with these caveats. The acting in my viewing is far better than average, but the script in the end is weak.
By Roland
It is easy not to like "Fierce People". For starters, it doesn't know what it wants to be. The first 3/5 are some sort of a "Coming of Age story meets Robert Altman" kind of deal, and then it gets dark, really dark, and turns into a very dark Coming of Age story. The movie is unsure which one it really wishes to be, and none of those themes are fully realized.
And yet the five stars, yes. There are two reasons for this.
The first one is that "Fierce People" doesn't deserve a three-star rating. It deserves at least four.
The second are the leading cast. Diane Lane and Donald Sutherland are superb, even if they don't really have much to play. Anton Yelchin is the true star of the movie and - just like anything else he's been in - he does a wonderful job. His character Finn is smart and naive, lively and contemplative, and also sort of dense. That is, until he is forced to grow up fast and deal with a trauma that could haunt him for life if he lets it. Yelchin has some really tough dramatic moments to pull through, and he is brilliant in them.
There is a certain subtlety in the movie. You can't really say it tries to *tell* you anything, but it is not empty either. This is where the "Robert Altman" part kicks in, and even if "Fierce People" is not on this level, it still manages to speak without saying things outright. It has its flaws, and this lack of clarity is a deffinite one in the end, but it's far from stupid. Like I said at the beginning, the movie is unsure of what it is trying to be, but what it ends up being, is good enough, and the acting is amazing.
If that is enough for you, go ahead.
Oh, and the cover is ridiculous. It makes "Fierce People" look like a romantic comedy. It's not. It's anything but romantic comedy.
By Kelly McGee
My enthusiasm for anthropology had me expecting a more in-depth application of the discipline; instead we get more of a coming of age story. Not bad though.
By astrorev (Sacramento, CA USA)
This is an uneven film. The first half is pleasant enough, but the plot develops so slowly as to go virtually nowhere. Then the movie takes a sudden dark turn, and though it held my attention from here out, it seemed too different, almost like watching a separate movie. The film has some fine moments of insights and sentiments, and it also contains moments that feel contrived and forced. High caliber actors did their usual fine job, but most of the characters are presented superficially. The attempt to draw parallels to an indigenous South American tribe with the assembled characters is marginal at best. This is a mixed movie for me; two and a half stars right down the middle, but not a twinkle more; they could have and should have done a better job.
By Sigrid Macdonald (Ottawa)
I quite liked this movie about a young boy and his drug addict mother who are befriended by one of the seven wealthiest men in the nation (Donald Sutherland). Finn (Anton Yelchin, a wonderful actor who I've loved in everything that I've ever seen him in, starting with Huff and moving on to House of D) and his mother, played by Diane Lane, leave the jungle of New York to go to the seeming tranquility of a massive palatial estate in New Jersey for the summer.
Initially, Finn is disappointed because he had wanted to spend the summer with his elusive father, an anthropologist studying tribal behavior in South America, whom Finn has never met. But he soon warms to the scenery when he meets young Maya, the granddaughter of the multi billionaire patriarch.
Basically, the movie draws a parallel between the tribe that Finn's father has studied and the actions of the rich and callous. In polite society, it's hard for Finn to know who his friends really are, and one person is as vicious and savage as one could possibly imagine.
It's some of those particularly brutal scenes that I found implausible based on the simple story of poor boy meets rich girl. However, the acting by Sutherland and Yelchin is great and I liked the movie altogether, although it was a bit disjointed, hard to follow at times and the ending was predictable.
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