The Passion of Ayn Rand

I stumbled across this little-noticed Showtime movie because DirecTV is offering several months of the channel for free (I see now it’s also on Netflix). With Helen Mirren as Ayn Rand, Peter Fonda as her husband, Eric Stoltz as her acolyte Nathaniel Branden, and Julie Delpy as his wife, on whose book the docudrama is based, the cast was intriguing enough for me to tune in. And it was indeed watchable, if largely uninformative and unrevealing, insufficiently controversial. Personalities come across -- Mirren as Rand in particular -- but motivations are unplumbed, reducing the story of one of the 20th century’s celebrated wackos to cross-currents of sexual jealousy. (1999, Show/T, n. ) *6*