OBSERVE the dark savagery of a severely isolated little tribe: the Wackowealthy. They populate the grounds of a massive New Jersey estate in 1978, drawing pornography on rocks with chalk, racing hot air balloons and calling each other “young squire.”
Finn, a newcomer to their Garden State Oz, finds the titular folk of “Fierce People” magnetically weird. The 16-year-old budding anthropologist has been freshly whisked from a forlorn corner of New York City where his mom (Diane Lane) used to send him on regular runs to pick up cocaine.
The kid (Anton Yelchin, dryly funny) and his wrecked mother are spending the summer at the country manse thanks to a mysterious favor she called in from “America’s seventh-richest man,” an oddball billionaire (Donald Sutherland). Finn falls for the old man’s supremely confident granddaughter (Kristen Stewart) while his mom denies, not plausibly, that she’s having an affair with the silvery patriarch.
Director Griffin Dunne’s adaptation of Dirk Wittenborn’s fiercely personal novel ambles pleasantly through coming-of-age movie territory, then takes a jarring Agatha Christie detour. Suddenly every act of conspicuous wackiness becomes a clue to a whodunit.
The search for answers elbows aside the more strangely affecting scenes: There’s a bewitchingly elaborate virginity-dumping ritual, some nice interplay between Finn and the girl’s sweetly depraved brother (Chris Evans) and brilliant details like the billionaire’s Montgomery Burns-ish habit of making his butler dip his cookies in milk for him. You have to love a line like, “I smell Episcopal voodoo!”
Though the mystery does work, it also feels thrown in from another movie. It’s a shame Dunne and Wittenborn weren’t quite confident enough to keep Finn hopping from one excellent peculiarity to the next.
FIERCE PEOPLE
***
Winsome wackjobs.
Running time: 112 minutes. Rated R (profanity, nudity, drug use, violence). At the Cinema 1 and the Sunshine.