Fierce People: Grade C

C
Fierce People (2007)
Donald Sutherland, Diane Lane, Anton Yelchin, Chris Evans, Kristen Stewart. Director Griffin Dunne.

Yelchin is a 15 year old with absent father and alcoholic mother. He is obsessed with anthropology and the fierce Amazonian Yanomami tribe. His mother (Lane), a masseuse, goes on the wagon and takes her son to a rich client’s estate in New Jersey. Sutherland, the rich man, gives a wonderful performance as a modern day Great Gatsby. There are parties, feasts, festivals, balloon races, and romances as the undereducated, amoral and idle rich fritter away their lives. The thrust of the story is that the boy is supposed to study the wealthy clan anthropologically, establishing a parallel with the premodern Yanomami by showing extremely primitive motives and behavior beneath the veneer of high society. The sets and costumes are excellent and do convey the boy’s sense of being accepted into the upper crust, but as a mascot, not a real member, perhaps as a participant anthropologist would be.

Unfortunately, all the characters are two-dimensional and uninteresting. The rich people’s antics are stereotypical, exaggerated, and the portrayal is mean-spirited. The directing of physical movement is good but the dialog is clunky so characters seem to be reciting lines. At the end of the movie, everybody just goes home. No conclusions are drawn, no lessons are learned. The filmmakers add some ghostly Yanomami tribesmen in the woods to reinforce the supposed parallel between the two kinds of “fierce people,” and that’s a nice touch, but only a superficial overlay, symptomatic of the way the premise for the story is wasted. The Nanny Diaries also adopted the anthropological premise but like this movie, threw it away. Rich people with feet of clay is a fertile topic, but it was explored better in The Godfather series or even in TV shows like Dallas, than in this movie. One last criticism is that Yelchin’s character grated on my nerves throughout. He plays a slow-talking, highly controlled, extremely precocious youth, so precocious that the character was downright annoying. The movie is a lost opportunity but moderately interesting for what it attempts to do.

Bernard and Doris: Grade C

C
Bernard and Doris (2007)
Susan Sarandon, Ralph Fiennes; Director Bob Balaban.

Doris Duke inherited a fortune from her father, for whom Duke University is named. This movie portrays her (Sarandon) as an eccentric, autocratic self-obsessed alcoholic and drug user who flits about the world on various adventures, but while she’s home at her mansion in New Jersey, is served by her Irish butler, Lafferty (Fiennes). The butler role is well-executed but not elevated to high art as it was by Anthony Hopkins in Remains of the Day. Duke is a caricature, not a person we ever get to know or understand or care about. As time goes on, the two trust each other and become friends. When Duke is away, Lafferty drinks his way through her wine cellar, and they become co-dependent addicts, laughing it up when she brings home colorful guests from her travels. Suddenly, in one scene, she has a stroke and in the next scene she is dead, leaving her fortune to her butler. He died shortly thereafter. There is no plot, and while Sarandon is a magnetic actor no matter what, there isn’t much work for her here. The detailed sets of a fabulously wealthy woman’s house are the most fun part of the movie. I rented this without noticing it was an HBO film, and its quality confirms my bias that television movies are often a full cut below theater releases, even when strong actors are billed. I haven’t a clue why that should be.