As he ages, Donald Sutherland increasingly resembles a virile, sexy version of Monty Woolley, the great wag and comic actor of the 1940s. And for a while, "Fierce People," wherein Sutherland plays the eccentric "seventh richest man in the world," looks like it might be a comedy of bourgeois manners on par with Woolley's classic "The Man Who Came to Dinner."

But overplotting and a particularly ugly turn make this adaptation of Dirk Wittenborn's novel less a meditation on how the rich are different than a bland coming-of-age procedural. The appealing Anton Yelchin, late of Showtime's sorely missed "Huff," plays Finn Earl, a teenager whose coke-addict mom (Diane Lane, radiant as always) agrees to work for Sutherland's Ogden C. Osborne on his New Jersey estate for the summer so she can sober up and the kid can get some fresh air and wholesome influences.

Instead, Finn finds sex, drugs and moral rot in a community that he decides to observe as if its residents were the subjects of a field study. (The father he never knew is a famous anthropologist.) Screenwriter Wittenborn and director Griffin Dunne overplay the parallels between the tribal rituals and taboos of Amazonians and aristos; when the tone goes from daffy to dour in the course of a harrowing plot point, the story becomes more forced than fierce.

-- Ann Hornaday (Sept. 21, 2007)

Contains profanity, drug use, sexuality, nudity and violence.