Fierce People

Comments (0) By Scott Foundas Tuesday, Aug 28 2007

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Fierce People
Directed by Griffin Dunne
Autonamous Films
Opens September 7

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When 16-year-old Finn (Anton Yelchin) gets busted scoring drugs for his coke-snorting, alcoholic masseuse of a mother (Diane Lane), Mom decides what the family really needs is a summer vacation on the estate of a wealthy client, Mr. Osborne (Donald Sutherland), whose sprawling, Kennedy-like New Jersey compound offers the anthropologically minded Finn a chance to observe the moneyed elite in their natural habitat. Until, that is, he gets a little too close for somebody's comfort to Mr. Osborne and his two grandchildren (Chris Evans and Kristen Stewart), which earns him a brutal beating and anal rape from an unidentified assailant on the Osborne grounds. In one of those karmic quirks of the film-releasing calendar, Fierce People, which was directed by Griffin Dunne and written by Dirk Wittenborn, is finally staggering into theaters—after more than two years on the shelf—barely a fortnight after The Nanny Diaries, that other cautionary tale about a proletariat pea that works its way under the mattress of the sockless-loaf er crowd. Adding to the déjà vu is the presence of Evans as a kind of anthropomorphic Ralph Lauren ad. But whereas most of the injustices suffered by Nanny's nanny are of the skin-deep variety, the hopelessly reductive Fierce People ups the ante: It says, in effect, tangle with these crazy rich, white folks and they will—quite literally—fuck you up the ass.