The supposedly inane problems of inherited wealth are reframed quite well in this film. I felt that there was an important contradiction made clear. America's 400 year old flight from Europe's monarchies and class systems is both long over and yet still taking place. I don't believe that this contradiction has anything to do with money.
Personal dignity is the prize at the end of the American dream. And yet dignity is far more elusive than we'd like to believe. This has a lot more to do with practical parenting and the real value that children have to their parents and how it's shown, NOT how much they spend or can spend on their children.
Americans have steadfastly (in principal) defined personal worth by personal achievement. Whether you began your days in humble circumstances or not, you can with effort, create the wealth and comfort for yourself and your family that you need. This is the American Idea. And yet this principal becomes mere theory for those whose lives are defined utterly by someone else's effort, often long before they were born.
The problems of these people are somewhat anachronistic to the rest of us. And also quietly disturbing because there is a wound that the American identity struggles with on the subject of wealth, power, history and privilege (royalty). Americans are both attracted to the glamor of privilege and repelled intellectually. Some part of our problem is universal; how to define personal value when those with power apparently don't need to worry about it. There is an important moment in the film where, in a candid remark, a young man describes a sense of pique he'd experienced where he had said to himself about someone he was annoyed with, "we could buy your family," and he believes it. This says volumes about the sense of narcissistic confusion that stems from an identity where basic values have not been passed down and personal dignity is not fought for. What more compelling is that the young man also seems to be aware of that fact.
A few of these people seem to be trying to reset their values to relate to the rest of us. This is a specifically American virtue and it separates them from the rest who have delusions of relevance bloated even more by this film's interest in their lives; they wouldn't be out of place in the courts of Europe a century ago.
A fascinating film.
