Patty Hearst

College student Patricia Hearst (Natasha Richardson) is a well-meaning rich girl who gets kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army. Their leader Cinque (Ving Rhames) intends on ransoming the heiress for the release of their imprisoned comrades. Eventually, she joins them in their revolutionary activities.

This is director Paul Schrader and this is Natasha Richardson. She is giving a full performance of this complicated, debated, and conflicted character. It lands squarely on her assertion of innocence. That may be disputed but it's well within reason and the movie presents a reasonable case. She feared for her life and submitted to survive. There are also a few familiar faces and Ving Rhames is as powerful as ever. This is good and Natasha is great.

Paul Schrader is one of the most talented directors of so called "New Hollywood", and it's really strange that almost all the films he directed are poorly rated on IMDb. That refers to his most productive phase from 1978 to 1988, when he made crafty social dramas such as "Blue collar" and "Hardcore", stylistic look on rotten high class devouring the individual, such as "American gigolo", art house remake, such as "Cat people", and a true masterpiece, such as "Mishima - Life in four chapters". At the end of this period comes "Patty Hearst", a biography, or to be exact a segment in life of America's most famous hostage turned terrorist of the 70's. This subject, as interesting as it is, has a lot of pitfalls, for a film maker. Filming such a story may turn into an emotional travel down the road of ridiculousness, cemented in victim's distorted point of view. Not with craftsmen like Paul Schrader. He did this film just exactly as it should have been done, terrors of capture, mixed with bewilderment of being a hostage, turned into confusion and daze with one's captors, which is everything Patty Hearst went through in her months of captivity. Late Natasha Richardson's performance is indeed low key, but that's probably the way real Patty Hearst felt and behaved, after all the movie is based on her own book. Scenes of the first two weeks after the abduction, when all abductors appear as silhouettes in a doorway, and constant images of being shot and dumped in a ditch, perfectly show what was going through Patty Hearst's mind at the time. She was just 19 and like the opening of the movie said "ofcourse there's a little one can do to prepare for the unknown".

This film marked the end of Paul Schrader's directorial peak, but it's well done, well acted, character development and symbolism are in full use of the story, and it deserves a much higher rating than it has. If you're a fan of Schraders work, don't miss it, if not, well decide for yourself. Recommended!

i don't agree with the comments of the other viewers. i think that the filmmakers purposefully created a detached style to inspire a more objective engagement in the story from the viewer. because the real interest of the patty hearst story, apart from being a totally unique and fascinating part of american mythology, is the mystery of "what really happened?" since the movie was based on patty hearst's side of things, it would have been very easy to create an emotionally engaging (or, read: manipulative) narrative that wholly supported her version of the story. officially the filmmakers had to present her version, but i think the way in which it was constructed purposefully makes you conscious, the whole time, of the various possibilities of reality that could have existed. and who is to say there is only one reality? certainly not these filmmakers.

I've watched this film quite a few times now, and frankly it just keeps getting better. Stylish and disturbing as only Paul Schrader can be, this film is also notable for its fantastic performances. Ving Rhames walks a paper-thin line between madness and parody. And of course there is the awesome William Forsythe who singlehandedly takes the film to another level. His performances are so astounding in general that they can even make Steven Segal (Out For Justice) watchable. This film served a respectable political purpose as well. Few people really understood what happened to Patty Hearst, especially if you were around to watch her be demonized by the media in the 70's. This film does a brilliant job of putting you in the shoes of a woman who lived through an unimaginable experience. (10/10)

Quite possibly the dullest kidnapping movie since "The Ransom of Red Chief". I mean, it's almost comical. You have a bland, boring WASP abducted by noisome, even more boring revolutionaries. Any humorous or even ironic implications, however, are left grimly unexplored by scenarist Nick Kazan and director Paul Schrader, the stolidity of the later being especially egregious when you consider that this is the guy who was able to look on the pathologies of Bob Crane as well as Dutch Calvinists from Grand Rapids from a somewhat mordant point of view. Give it a generous C, mostly for Natasha Richardson whose good acting is the terxtbook definition of collateral damage.