The central conceit of Griffin Dunne’s Fierce People,
adapted from his own novel by Dirk Wittenborn, is derived from that
favorite liberal and multicultural principle that, underneath our
superficial differences from even the most exotic or savage of the
world’s peoples, we of the supposedly more advanced civilizations
are really all just the same. And, in the case of
particularly warlike savages, it’s our rich and powerful people who
are just the same. Like any primitive tribe, they live without
rule, without morality, without conscience or scruple towards those
whom they must destroy in order to live as they please.
Do you think you can see where Messrs. Dunne and Wittenborn are
going with this?
Finn (Anton Yelchin) is a boy of about 17 who has never met his
father, a famed anthropologist working among the primitive
Ishkanani — the name means “fierce people” — in the South
American jungle. One day, in the summer of 1980, his dad writes to
invite Finn to do field work with him in the jungle. He’s excited
about this, but before he can go he is busted in a drug raid as he
attempts to buy drugs for his addicted mother (Diane Lane). He
refuses to rat her out. But he suddenly finds himself bailed out by
a billionaire called Ogden C. Osborne (Donald Sutherland),
allegedly the seventh richest man in the world, whom mom, a
masseuse, has met in the course of her work. Mr. Osborne not only
“takes care of” Finn’s drugs charge, but he offers both him and his
mother a place to stay for the summer on his vast estate, Vlyvalle,
in New Jersey.
We are never told exactly what business Osborne industries is
in, apart from the fact that the old man “makes his pear brandy
just the way they do in France.” Somehow I don’t think you get to
be the seventh richest man in the world by doing that. But we are
told where the Osborne fortune originated, and — just as Balzac
said — it turns out to have been in a forgotten crime. Except that
the crime is not forgotten but remembered proudly by Osborne
himself. His father had employed his mother to seduce the owner of
a telegraph company. Dad stole the company out from under the other
man by blackmailing him with an incriminating photograph of the
couple in flagrante — a photograph that he had taken
himself.
It’s that touch of ruthlessness that seems most to impress old
man Osborne and that sounds to me as if it would be something
beyond even the bloodthirsty Ishkanani, but then I’m not an
anthropologist.
At Vlyvalle, Finn is initiated into the ways of the sybaritic
and conscienceless rich. He forms an attachment to old Mr. Osborne
and also to his grandchildren, the comely Maya (Kristen Stewart), a
girl of about his own age, and the manly Bryce (Chris Evans), who
studied anthropology at Harvard and admires Finn’s dad, whom he
calls “the Elvis of anthropology.” Bryce is the kind of preppy guy
who goes in for hot-air balloon racing and who pays tribute to Finn
— naturally a very cool teenager — by calling him “a gentleman
and a scholar.” After a day or two he proclaims “lifelong
friendship” for Finn and warm approval of his relationship with
Maya. “Welcome to the tribe, brother,” he says. While Finn learns
the ways of the tribe, mom joins AA and begins to get her life
together. Old Osborne introduces her to the people of Vlyvalle as
his doctor. When she protests, he says: “For ten square miles, I’m
king. If I say you’re a doctor, you’re a doctor.”
All is going swimmingly until something terrible happens to
Finn. Something Ishkanani terrible. Obviously, I have no intention
of spoiling the movie for you by giving away the ending, but you
would have to be the veriest innocent in the thinking of today’s
movie culture not to know instantly who is going to turn out to be
the bad guy. You can probably guess without even seeing the movie.
The only question that remains, then, is whether or not Finn can
learn from his studies of the Ishkanani how to take a condign
revenge on this person and so redeem his nureshi, or
tutelary spirit.
Yet here the film lacks the courage of its own left-wing
convictions. I think it is way too glib to say that these highly
sophisticated rich people are “really” just like the savage
Ishkanani, but if you’re going to say that and if, further, you’re
going to show dear little Finn becoming Ishkananized by them, and
by what’s happened to him, then you’ve already cut him loose from
the enlightened conscience and sense of social responsibility that
commercial movie-makers, rightly or wrongly, think he has to retain
in order to win the sympathy of the audience. There the movie loses
its nerve, allowing Finn in the end to look down upon the Osbornes
from a position of moral — and political — superiority, just as
Mr. Wittenborn himself does. I don’t know about you, but I’m not
buying it.
