The first half of Fierce People is a mildly amusing coming of age story. The second half is a huge mess. I don't think I've ever seen another movie that just spins apart like this.
The film starts out with a teenaged boy named Finn (Anton Yelchin) and his drug addicted masseuse of a mother (Diane Lane). He gets busted getting her drugs, so she decides they're going to spend summer away from the city at the estate of one of her old clients (Donald Sutherland) who happens to be the 7th richest man in the United States. Stuck for the next few months on the 10 square miles of the rich man's estate, Finn decides to make an anthropological study of the "tribe" of the rich man's family and hangers-on. What follows is about an hour of the same movie you've seen before about a young man in a strange place learning lessons about life.
That first half of the movie is relatively entertaining. The only real problems are that Finn is a fairly unimpressive and not-terribly-likable character, which is actually pretty realistic for a teenaged boy, and that the story abruptly switches away from Finn and focuses on his mother for a short period. Normally, anything that keeps the beautiful Diane Lane on screen isn't a bad thing, but Finn is such an uninspiring main character that the story really needs to do as much with him as it can.
All in all, though, that first hour is pleasant and even charming, if a bit ridiculous when the rich man's granddaughter keeps throwing herself at Finn like a nymphomaniac. It will hold your attention and even make you interested in seeing how the story's going to develop right up until Finn gets beaten and raped in a grassy field.
I'll admit, I didn't see that coming at all. And, perhaps, that could have been the point where a mediocre coming-of-age movie took off and became something quite special. However, that ain't what happened. When Finn gets raped, it becomes a completely different sort of story but the filmmakers don't seem to know how to tell it. They don't embrace the darker, more dramatic tale in front of them and they haphazardly try to reinsert the gentler tone of the first hour. Eventually, the movie loses all sense of itself and drowns in Gothic melodrama and a climactic scene that looks like it was ripped off from one of those teen suspense thrillers, like The Skulls. It's almost as though they brought in a different director and writer for that scene.
The guy who wrote this movie also wrote the book upon which it is based, and it's possible that this story worked as a novel. When you've got hundreds of pages and hundreds of thousands of words to work with, you can get beneath the surface of the story with meditations and asides and digressions that take the reader's attention away from a surface story which might be too choppy or roiled up. But in a movie, all you have is the surface and if that surface story doesn't work, there's no way to hide it.
Fierce People REALLY doesn't work. A movie that shifts so harshly in the middle may never be able to work, but it's like these filmmakers don't even try. So instead of an interesting failure Fierce People just fails.
The film starts out with a teenaged boy named Finn (Anton Yelchin) and his drug addicted masseuse of a mother (Diane Lane). He gets busted getting her drugs, so she decides they're going to spend summer away from the city at the estate of one of her old clients (Donald Sutherland) who happens to be the 7th richest man in the United States. Stuck for the next few months on the 10 square miles of the rich man's estate, Finn decides to make an anthropological study of the "tribe" of the rich man's family and hangers-on. What follows is about an hour of the same movie you've seen before about a young man in a strange place learning lessons about life.
That first half of the movie is relatively entertaining. The only real problems are that Finn is a fairly unimpressive and not-terribly-likable character, which is actually pretty realistic for a teenaged boy, and that the story abruptly switches away from Finn and focuses on his mother for a short period. Normally, anything that keeps the beautiful Diane Lane on screen isn't a bad thing, but Finn is such an uninspiring main character that the story really needs to do as much with him as it can.
All in all, though, that first hour is pleasant and even charming, if a bit ridiculous when the rich man's granddaughter keeps throwing herself at Finn like a nymphomaniac. It will hold your attention and even make you interested in seeing how the story's going to develop right up until Finn gets beaten and raped in a grassy field.
I'll admit, I didn't see that coming at all. And, perhaps, that could have been the point where a mediocre coming-of-age movie took off and became something quite special. However, that ain't what happened. When Finn gets raped, it becomes a completely different sort of story but the filmmakers don't seem to know how to tell it. They don't embrace the darker, more dramatic tale in front of them and they haphazardly try to reinsert the gentler tone of the first hour. Eventually, the movie loses all sense of itself and drowns in Gothic melodrama and a climactic scene that looks like it was ripped off from one of those teen suspense thrillers, like The Skulls. It's almost as though they brought in a different director and writer for that scene.
The guy who wrote this movie also wrote the book upon which it is based, and it's possible that this story worked as a novel. When you've got hundreds of pages and hundreds of thousands of words to work with, you can get beneath the surface of the story with meditations and asides and digressions that take the reader's attention away from a surface story which might be too choppy or roiled up. But in a movie, all you have is the surface and if that surface story doesn't work, there's no way to hide it.
Fierce People REALLY doesn't work. A movie that shifts so harshly in the middle may never be able to work, but it's like these filmmakers don't even try. So instead of an interesting failure Fierce People just fails.