MBunge 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.

charlytully To the eight people who found the previous FIERCE PEOPLE comments by "Psycolicious Me" and "Topdany" "helpful," as well as to any future site visitors who see them before their authors delete them: these negative critique's are not only shorter than the site guidelines mandate, but they are entirely bogus, nonfactual, incorrect, and misinformative. For instance, Blythe's dad is in a coma, NOT dead--Maya and Finn even visit him in the hospital. Furthermore, it was estate deer poacher Dwayne--NOT Blythe--who knocked up Jilly the maid, etc., etc. So if you have ADD which makes you incapable of focusing on the simplest details, please keep your condition to yourself by not pretending to be Siskel or Ebert. Otherwise, include a disclaimer with your comments!

PsycoliciousMe Me and my friend read the summery and watched the trailer and were very interested and excited to go rent this movie. BAD IDEA. We thought a movie with actors that influential would have been a sure hit, but our expectations fell extremely short. First of all, the trailer and summery are misleading to the point of lies. The movie started out slow for the first 1 1/2 hours(reminder, its about two hours long) and when it finally started to gain momentum, It sucked. Plus, the plots were very hard to follow. It confused us because it kept skipping from one story to another in random order. The characters where not very realistic when it came to reality. Sure the mum and son could be actual people in reality, but everyone else seemed to be one extreme or the other. If your a person who likes sick, twisted, unusual movies, then go for it. But we advise not wasting two hours of you life you cant get back. Unfortunitly, no one told us that...

larry-411 I attended a screening of "Fierce People" at the 2006 Woodstock Film Festival. I hesitate to label it a "premiere" of any sort, since it was shot in the spring of 2004 and had its world premiere at Tribeca in 2005. It played several festivals that year. Release seemed imminent, then it disappeared. Poof. Vanished. Or so it appeared to the film-going public. Rumors of a theatrical or DVD release have popped up now and then, but all proved unfounded. Then this screening was announced. Perhaps one can call it a "re-premiere?" It certainly felt as if I was witness to a buried treasure. And what a treasure it was.I suppose one could characterize "Fierce People" as a coming-of-age drama. But it also has elements of comedy and tragedy, as well as mystery. And a bit of farce thrown in. In short, real life. That makes it hard to pigeonhole, which puts it more into the category of an indie as opposed to a Hollywood movie. But its high production values, big budget feel, and star caliber cast seem at odds with the indie label. So let's call it a hybrid. And, perhaps, that's why it's been "lost." It defies categorization.Meet Finn Earl (Anton Yelchin), 15, whose father is absent. In fact, Finn has never known him. But he sees him and hears him via the collection of home movies sent from South America. Dad is a renowned anthropologist, and has made a name for himself by setting up shop with the Yanomani, the tribe of "Fierce People" who live to kill and, well, procreate. All their activities are built around those two "tasks," and Finn is captivated by it. Mom Liz (Diane Lane) is also somewhat absent. Although present physically, she is lost in a world of cocaine and alcohol. So Finn becomes an adult in his little solitary world with his reels of film.One summer, Mom decides to drag Finn along with her into the wilds of New Jersey. A massage therapist, Mom has catered to a wealthy client, Ogden C. Osborne (Donald Sutherland, in a tour de force performance) and he has invited her for an extended house call at his palatial estate. Osborne's "tribe" includes an assortment of eccentric rich kids, servants, and village idiots among whom Finn will find himself part of his own anthropological study. Will his experience with Dad's films help him survive life as a visitor to this tribe? Will he be accepted? Or will he be seen as an outsider, concurrently struggling with his own identity as an adolescent? Such is the stuff of fairy tales, and I suppose this would be if not for the dark underbelly which director Griffin Dunne and writer Dirk Wittenborn have infused into this magnificent story.With Anton Yelchin's voice-over, intercutting pieces of Dad's home movies, Finn must learn to go back to being the teenager he never really had a chance to be, stop being the parent to his Mom, allow newly-sober Mom to be parent to him, and learn responsibility on the way to adulthood the way it should have taken place all along. Yet he needs to make this transformation in a dangerous, dark world where playing with fire is folly to this fractured family.This is, first and foremost, a story-driven film and Griffin Dunne emphasized as much in the intro to the film. He bought the rights to Wittenborn's novel even as it was being written, and Wittenborn's own screenplay comes to life in the hands of the masterful Dunne in a way that's a work of wonder.This is also largely a character-driven film, and Sutherland has never been better. His star turn as Osborne stunned those around me and will likely leave you amazed as well. Diane Lane's character ultimately exhibits so many personalities that it's hard to imagine another actor pulling it off so well. She is breathtaking. But more than anything, "Fierce People" is Anton Yelchin's film. He has a long resume as a child actor but preciously little as a teen. Other than the little-known "House of D" (also a gem), he is best known as Byrd on TV's "Huff." In January, he will be seen in "Alpha Dog" (also sitting on the shelf since 2004, a film I saw at Sundance this year and in which he is the "heart and soul"). His performance here goes far beyond what one would expect from someone so young, and is nothing short of spectacular.This complex, quirky film has remained out of sight long enough. "Fierce People" is a treasure filled with light and shadow, comedy and tragedy, joy and pathos, but mostly wonder.