The Passion of Ayn Rand (1999) from Tuna

Nathaniel became a psychologist, and Ayn's protégé.

Barbara proved to be frigid, and somewhat of a mouse, and Ayn's husband Frank (Peter Fonda) was also rather slow next to Ayn and Nathaniel, so ....

This film was produced by Showtime, and earned awards for Fonda and Mirren. Mirren was absolutely the high point of this film. The entire film is dark and grainy. Although the story is somewhat soap opera-like, Ayn Rand is an interesting enough character, and Mirren did such a great job with the role that it was watchable.

Scoopy's notes in yellow

• Objectivist and free-thinker Ayn Rand was an interesting person, as Tuna contends. She consistently challenged the assumptions inherent in Western culture, and was keen to expose those assumptions as arbitrary and/or unjustifiable.
• Rand was not, however, a likeable person, either in real life or as portrayed here, and that may pollute your enjoyment of a film centered around her selfishness and the selfishness of her protégé. Rand found altruism to be tantamount to weakness. Mirren captures Rand's direct and penetrating mind accurately, to my limited understanding, but that doesn't make her any easier to relate to. The only really likeable character is the unassuming husband whose centered and unchallenging personality provided stability in Rand's life. The uncomplicated and gentle soul was played with the dotty ex-hippie charm that Peter Fonda exudes effortlessly.
• I remember reading Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead years ago and feeling the same way about them that I felt about this movie, that they possessed features to admire, and features to debate, but none to like.
• In a world in which French and English speakers find it so difficult to master each other's pronunciation, Julie Delpy gets my award for the native French speaker with the best command of English (especially American pronunciation and idiom). She won this competition by so much that nobody finished second. Delpy plays an American woman in this film and she could almost pass. If you listen carefully, you can hear that she is foreign, but I can't pick up any trace of a French accent. I mean none at all.

• Mirren is battling it out with Sally Kirkland for the award for "oldest nude scene not involving Jessica Tandy". She was about 53 when she did this.
• I notice that as Helen gets older, she looks more and more Slavic. Although she was born in the U.K., her real name is Ilynea Mironoff - or probably more correctly, Mironova. Ayn Rand was Russian, and Mirren was a masterstroke of casting in just about any way you can imagine. I doubt if they ever considered any other actress.