Fierce People.

Nick Schager at Slant on Fierce People: "Director Griffin Dunne's ability to elicit fine performances from [Diane] Lane and [Donald] Sutherland, who share a mature, authentic chemistry, initially overshadows the easy-target critique supplied by Dirk Wittenborn's script (from his own novel). Yet after many soft jabs at its spoiled affluent cretins, Fierce People takes a thoroughly ill-advised wrong turn into male-rape territory."

"[W]hereas most of the injustices suffered by [The Nanny Diaries'] nanny are of the skin-deep variety, the hopelessly reductive Fierce People ups the ante," writes Scott Foundas in the Voice. "It says, in effect, tangle with these crazy rich, white folks and they will - quite literally - fuck you up the ass."

Updated through 9/10.

"Fierce People is nasty, unfunny and wildly incongruous," writes Stephen Snart in the L Magazine.

"That a film with such a pedigree could sit on the shelf for so long (it's already available on DVD in Argentina, Finland, Greece and Hungary) is one of the vagaries of a business in which too many movies from too many distributors are vying for too few weekends, good ones that are released theatrically often fail to attract an audience, and countless others go straight to video." David M Halbfinger has the story on this one in the New York Times.

"Dunne is intent on high-kicking emotional show-off-ery, and the characters you have been tricked into caring about largely by virtue of some improbably natural, inflected performances (and his initially gentle and restrained direction), are put into situations you can help but resent the director for conceiving," writes Michelle Orange at the Reeler.

For IFC News, Aaron Hillis talks with Dunne: "I think every family is dysfunctional, or everyone assumes their family is. There's almost a competitive pride in people's dysfunctions.... But I actually find dysfunction in families a humorous subject rather than any sad-sack tragedy. The next movie I'm doing is about the siblings of the parents who wrote and appear in the illustrations of a book like The Joy of Sex, and how they've been brought up with that their whole life. Family never ceases to interest me."

Update, 9/10: "The intriguing conceit of Fierce People is that the idle superrich and the Ishkanani, whose rituals are shown on reels of film sent from South America by Finn's father, are equally vicious," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "This is a nifty idea that is laboriously overworked."

Posted by dwhudson at September 6, 2007 1:17 PM