In 'Fierce People,' the party never starts

When the alcoholic, coked-up masseuse in "Fierce People" moves herself and her 16-year-old son onto the old rich guy's country estate, there should be adventure, right? I mean the gazillionaire shares this place with a host of minions and interesting acolytes, including his daughter (another drinker) and her two derelict children. But the party never starts.

Sure, there's a hot-air balloon race, some semi-erotic body painting, teen drug use, and an absurd, 11th-hour descent into cable-thriller woodland foot chases. How, though, does any of that parse with some of the narration? Sample: "We are the sum of all the people we have ever met. You change the tribe. The tribe changes you." The platitudes in this gratuitously sentimental movie are taken a lot more seriously than the people.

Directed by the actor Griffin Dunne, adapted by Dirk Wittenborn from his novel, and shelved for many months by the film's original distributor, "Fierce People" strives to create a portrait of social corrosion in the land of the anciently wealthy, circa 1980. The film uses the classic window to view the rich: the eyes of a lower class. Having gone sober, Liz the masseuse (Diane Lane) and her aggravated son, Finn (Anton Yelchin), leave the Upper East Side for the universe of Ogden C. Osborne (Donald Sutherland) and are immediately drawn into its eccentricities. (Osborne himself doesn't seem all that eccentric. He seems like Donald Sutherland. Elizabeth Perkins, meanwhile, has virtually nothing useful to do as his daughter.)

Finn was supposed to spend the summer in South America with the anthropologist father he's never met, studying a tribe whose translated name gives the movie its title. Instead, he falls in with Bryce (Chris Evans), a lost bohemian preppie who'll presumably find his calling when Reagan is elected, and falls in lust with Bryce's sister Maya (Kristen Stewart). These two are just garden-variety rich-kid whiners with access to drugs and alcohol but who have no discernible connection to the outside world. There was probably something the filmmakers could have done with the young Osbornes' brooding and entitlement. But Finn is already seduced by their privilege. Of course, since "Fierce People" amounts to a dramatically thin cautionary tale, Finn unsuccessfully treats the whole liaison as an anthropological study.

The film is way too banal to raise any questions of its own. Dunne, for his part, doesn't conjure up any kind of inspired visual atmosphere or compelling psychological tension. Nothing is as funny, touching, true, or sad as it should be. This hothouse is air-conditioned. And watching it, you might think of recent movies about the rich and the damned: "The Royal Tenenbaums" or "Running With Scissors," say. "Fierce People" fits in that group. But it's also confused in a way those movies weren't. It wants to cut the wealthy open with a spoon.