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BaftaBaby 
"Always entranced by cinema."
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 Posted - 04/25/2007 : 12:22:47
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To judge by its almost universal condemnation Alpha Dog - which only recently opened in the UK, where the case it's based on got little if any coverage - I must have seen a different film. The concensus is that writer/director Nick Cassavetes extrapolates nothing from the facts in his fictionalized account of the kidnapping of a minor whose self-destructive half-brother owes lotsa dough to a quasi LA teen gang which dabbles in drug-dealing.
Along the way we're allowed into an anarchistic center bordered by middle-class disjointed me-first families. This is a world where the kids of the Mazurskys, a "nice Jewish couple" have already made it clear they're not going to follow the expected path; where a wealthy divorcee [Alex Kingston] will shut the bedroom door on her distraught daughter to return to her first fuck in months; where an alcoholic father [Chris Kinkade] will offer one of his two bedmates to his son [Justin Timberlake], and expect him to clean the house and tend his organic garden the next morning.
Whereas most of the crits focus on whether it was entirely ethical for the prosecution to have helped Cassavetes make a film at all considering the real kidnap leader - Jesse James Hollywood [yes, that's his real name] was still on the run, becoming the FBI's youngest Most Wanted - and, what seemed to bother them more - that not enough distinction was made between faction and fiction.
Well, I must say I didn't care about any of that and watched it as the film which unfurled in front of me. That film immediately engaged me, grabbed me by the wrist - if not the throat - and pulled me along into a world which surely ain't my own. It's not a pretty world, in fact it's about as ugly as it gets. This is mostly because it understands our preconceptions and reverse-prejudices about white middle-class America, a view reinforced by most Hollywood film and television product.
What are perceived as lives devoid of meaning aren't usually associated with this tranche of society, and so, paradoxically it's usually easier for financially comfortable white audiences to watch similar tales featuring ethnic minority young people in desperate situations who are either rescued or redeemed by white folks [Dangerous Minds, etc]; or just watch them live out lives of chaos and noisy desperation [e.g. Tsotsi]. Rarely do we get a story of middle-class black families who don't need a honky hand-out - such as the wonderful Akeelah and the Bee. Rarer still are we allowed into the unexpected world which Cassavetes reveals.
He takes us down the back alleys of American Beauty, those well-disguised mean streets which, for all their trees and picture windows and swimming pools out back, might as well be sewers. But this is no story of one aberrant family crisis; it implies an entire generation has lost control, and so has the society pledged to nurture it. One of the characters - Justin Timberlake, in a very credible performance - seems most aware of the wider break-down and tries in several albeit ineffective ways to draw some kind of boundary around a center that oozes disaster. When he realizes - through the drug haze that fuels nearly all the characters - the enormity of what he and his pals have messed with, he repeats as a mantra that "everything is under control." Clearly, it ain't.
That the real story was and to some extent still is unresolved doesn't negate what Cassavetes is trying to do. Okay, what have we got:
Jesse James Hollywood is transmuted into Johnny Truelove, son of dubious, possibly mob-related very wealthy Bruce Willis - in what I think is his best performance for decades: unfussed, unaffected, and totally credible, his genuine love for his son is conflated with a contempt for the law and its minions including the press. We see him mostly being interviewed about whether or not he helped his son escape and denying any knowledge of his whereabouts or his involvement in what has become a front-page story.
Johnny, who [before the age of 20] has amassed his own considerable wealth through drug-dealing, has taken lessons from The Sopranos in how to deal with meths addict Jake Mazursky [Ben Foster] who can't make good his debts. After simple violence fails to work, Johnny masterminds a plan to kidnap Mazursky's younger half-brother Zach [Anton Yelchin] and sweep up the ransom. When, however, he learns that kidnap is an offense punishable by life imprisonment he opts to have the kid killed. Zach, who worships his older brother and feels trapped in his middle-class Jewish family, not only merrily goes along with the plan but is more than happy to indulge in the life-style of his captors and their wider circle of friends. By the end, even as he suspects that far from being allowed home, he's been the pawn in some game that's gone too far, he makes no attempt to resist.
It's not quite Stockholm syndrome, though there are elements of it. It's more that through Zach's innocent discovery of what is considered normal by a group of post high-school kids we're forced to confront the kind of society foretold by WB Yeats's powerful poem The Second Coming: ..."Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world/The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;/
The best lack all convictions, while the worst/
Are full of passionate intensity."
My advice is run do not walk to see this film. Because of its assured direction and performances which may surprise you -- including one from Sharon Stone as the Mazursky matriarch - and because Cassavetes has chosen a story-telling format which keeps drawing you in and pushing you away - I think you're in for a viewing experience which may not be comfortable, but which will remain with you for a long time.
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Alpha Dog
