Fierce People

I am pretty sure the fact that the hot girl du jour, Kristen Stewart, should get this 2005 movie the audience it deserves.

Trapped in his mother's Lower East Side apartment, sixteen-year-old Finn Earl (Anton Yelchin) wants nothing more than to escape New York. He wants to spend the summer in South America studying the Ishkanani Indians (called "Fierce People"), with the anthropologist father he's never met. Finn's dreams are shattered when he is arrested in a desperate effort to help his drug-dependent mother, Liz (Diane Lane), who works as a massage therapist. Determined to get their lives back on track, Liz moves the two of them into a guesthouse for the summer on the vast country estate of her ex-client, the aging aristocratic billionaire, Ogden C. Osbourne (Donald Sutherland).

In Osbourne's close world of privilege and power, Finn and Liz encounter the super rich, a tribe portrayed as fiercer and more mysterious than anything they might find in the South American jungle. (Dirk Wittenborn, the author of the novel on which the film is based, grew up a poor outsider among the super rich in an upper-crust New Jersey enclave).

Earl soon becomes an object of attention for Osborne's two children (Kristen Stewart and Chris Evans), with mixed results to put it mildly, which I won't reveal and form the basis of the plot.

Throughout, this film was quirky, sexy, surprising, funny and original and I recommend it highly.

'Fierce People' is indeed fierce, and dare I say truthful in many ways. Often it is said that the 'rich' have better lives than the 'poor', and whilst this may be a crass over-generalisation it is indeed something that many people believe. That is until the veil is removed and the horror of such a 'truth' revealed. That truth can be extreme, nauseating and offensive to even the most liberal of moralities, and for this reason some people may find scenes within the film difficult to watch.

In fact, those hidden and shadowed lives once they are made known, make for a sad indictment on just how inhuman some people can be if given the freedom to act they way they really are. Unfortunately wealth, privilege and the power that comes with money, often makes for such liberty. There are some exceptions, however these are few and far between, and even those with good intention find themselves at the mercy of their own privilege and circumstance.

Many of these points cannot be discussed in the detail I would like, as such would give the plot away. Needless to say, I found the deception endemic amongst the privileged, and in particular their children, to be offensive in the extreme. The manner in which they treated those they considered 'beneath' them was a unsettling revelation, as I have often found myself an observer to similar offences. Staff and people are treated as property, and are bought and sold with little regard to their own feelings, desires, families and circumstances.

The film is full of seasoned actors such as Diane Lane and Donald Sutherland both of whom are profound, as well as some of Hollywood's most talented young actors (Kristen Stewart and Anton Yelchin). Anton Yelchin in particular was brilliant, and his ability to traverse a difficult subject matter, and show the horrible raw emotion that follows a sexual assault where the victim is male, is nothing less than professional. He is indeed an under-rated actor.

A very good film, with a sublime (yet necessary) social commentary to boot. The fact that male sexual victimisation is explored as a subject, sets this film apart. Male victims are a reality, as are their emotions, vulnerabilities and internal shame. Yet, little is done to address such in popular commentary.

By comparing the South American Ishkanani Indians with the rich Osbourne clan, this film shows that each within its own small kingdom acts very similarly despite the supposed difference in development. It is a very engrossing, if at times uncomfortable film to watch; one that definitely warrants its 15 certificate for its subject matter.

The acting is first rate by all the main characters; especially Donald Sutherland and Chris Evans, the former as the head of the clan and grandfather to Evans.

Unfortunately there are no extras though.

Highly recommended.