I look like a total moron and that's not who I am "This has been a total nightmare," one of the film's subjects told The New York Observer recently on condition of anonymity. "I look like a total moron, and that's not who I am." Certainly, finding the moron element has been a bit of a sport for the American tabloids. That, more than anything, makes them different from their British counterparts (and perhaps also from their own parents); our aristocrats have little familiarity with the sort of American-style confessional openness that can temper the effect of generations of studied emotional repression.Johnson's subjects are presented as a strange form of almost involuntary club. But Johnson himself does not seem to be aiming for caricature; his characterisations, even at their most blas?r obnoxious, ring pretty true.The fascination of his film, for non-tabloid critics and audiences, stems rather from its rare and intimate view of a forbidden world. The effect is almost anthropological, like a David Attenborough documentary on some rare species and the idiosyncracies of its habitat. There are also contributions from the 27-year-old model and heiress to a grocery chain Juliet Hartford, and Georgina Bloomberg, daughter of Michael, tycoon and Mayor of New York, who confides that her family name "stinks".It is easy to look for the ridiculous in this cast of characters. Clearly, some of them fear this is exactly how they are going to be viewed. And Josiah Hornblower, the Whitney/Vanderbilt heir, describes the astonishment he remembers feeling, as a child, that not everybody has a family museum in Manhattan, as he does. ("I don't have enough fingers," he explains, looking at his hands as he reels off Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Gourmet, GQ and the rest.) A textile heir called Cody Franchetti refers to idle chitchat shared with "Lauren" and "Isabella" without feeling the need to supply their last names (Hutton and Rossellini).
Ivanka Trump, daughter of Donald, suggests her father has endured greater troubles than the homeless people who gather outside his buildings because he, unlike them, has gone billions of dollars into debt. Luke Weil discusses how the bar bill of an evening at an exclusive night club in the Hamptons can easily mount into thousands of dollars ("These things happen"). The first inkling he had of his extraordinary financial good fortune came when he was 10, and a classmate of his found his father's name in the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans.The experience was both humiliating and strangely revelatory: "I felt I was finding out a secret I wasn't supposed to know." And it might have been the early seed that planted in his head the notion that all this money, and the hushed silence around it, needed to be explored if it was to be understood.The film opens with Jamie's 21st birthday party, a black-tie event that also marked the evening that he came into his inheritance and gained control of "more money than most people can earn or spend in a lifetime". And, as we are introduced to his friends, we quickly realise this is no ordinary group of people.SI Newhouse IV, heir to the Cond?ast publishing empire, has trouble naming all the magazines his family controls. Jamie himself is seen carefully donning his tails and top hat. There is a Gatsby-ish feel to the occasion, not least because of the period flapper costumes of the women, and the obvious excess of pyramids of crystal champagne coupes. "It's something you have to figure out for yourself."When he was little and growing up in the New York countryside with horses and gilded carriages, nobody thought to explain to him that there was anything unusual about his station in life. |
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