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Nick Cassavetes' Alpha Dog

by Andre Gallant
01/12/2007

In Alpha Dog, Nick Cassavetes' entry into the teenie bopper gangster genre in which suburban privilege is wasted upon the young, kids get too stoned, watch violent and exploitative music videos, and, of course, take hostages whenever their drug deals go sour.

Members of the x - y generation tend to file these films in the "So What" category. Being raised in the secretly permissive 90s means having at least a secondhand knowledge of petty criminality. And I think we would all agree that we now live in a post-gangster rap world. So, if you didn't hang out in the smoking section in high school, or, if your 16 year old didn't get gonorrhea at a weekend slumber party orgy while rolling, maybe you've seen one of the many attempts at documenting the after hours world of teenage vice.

As Americana as the juvenile Bowery Boys in Sidney Kingsley's Dead End, the kids in these youth gone wild films have created a greater scare amidst the paranoia surrounding the recent rise in teen drug use. In the past decade and a half, films such as Kids, Thirteen, and Bully have placed a cinematic face on the whole teenage behavioral problem. Alpha Dog, much like a shaky teenager, either really wants to be a Larry Clark movie - naked teens using drugs, youthful exuberance going too far - or a white trash criminal's morality play. It performs neither task well. Luckily, I love crime movies - even the weak pasty white boy kind - and I find bong hits really, really funny to watch on screen.

Alpha Dog recounts a week in the unraveling high life of Johnny Truelove (Emile Hirsch) and his gang. Helped by his father - Bruce Willis impersonating Italian leather - Johnny supplies his Southern California neighborhood with drugs and employs thugs of the usual low self-esteem. He's a Scarface for the four bedroom brick ranch posse.

Business becomes complicated when Jake (Ben Foster), a telemarketing speed freak with a $1200 debt, evades payment and fights spit with fireballs when Johnny's hires try to muscle the money out of him. A pissing contest ensues with Truelove eventually trumping Jake by kidnapping and murdering his little brother (Anton Yelchin).

Cassavetes' film is based on events surrounding the demise of San Fernando Valley drug kingpin Jesse James Hollywood. Hiding out in Brazil until his capture in 2005, Hollywood became the youngest person ever to make the F.B.I's Most Wanted list. With production having wrapped some months prior to Hollywood's arrest, Cassavetes was forced to reshoot the film's original ending.

Watching the film, and understanding that the writer/director kept the narrative as fact based as possible, it feels like a really well shot A&E special. Alpha Dog rolls along much like a true crime show; for the most part, the drug use hangs hazily over the scenes, allowing these idiot characters to mess up their own damn lives. Although, I think watching a red-eyed Justin Timberlake take bong hits - and become "so high that (he) can't even see" - will be a favorite scene of any moviegoer. Cassavetes' use of the film within the film device will probably bore most viewers, as it digs for deeper meaning with a spoon, but otherwise the film is allowed to progress with a lighter directorial hand than many independent films.

Unfortunately, Alpha Dog is subject to the rigors of its reality, a malady that Nick Cassavetes' narrative efforts can't quite surpass. Example: Ben Foster's Jake Mazursky. I'd seen him before as the long greasy haired brooding arsonist in Hostage and as the bleach blond brooding Angel in X-Men 3: The Last Stand. Here, he depresses himself into a tattooed Jewish neo-nazi(?) with a penchant for kung-fu. Foster is powerful as Jake: he fills every scene like a 2-liter soda that's been shaken about. He fizzes for a moment, and you are unsure if he is going to blow his top this time or not. Usually, he does.

It's difficult to discern if Foster's performance is powerful due to sheer talent, the unbelievable ridiculousness of it all, or the simple fact that he is not included in the final hour plus. Nothing happens to Jake - he doesn't get capped - Cassavetes found it impossible to write the character into scenes that he just didn't factually belong in. The truth tricked the director's fictions. Foster is responsible for most of the energy early in the film; serving not only as a catalyst, but also as pure entertainment, the story suffers without him drop-kicking it along. As his character gets fact-ed out to the picture's sidelines, the film shifts its weight to Emile Hirsch's Hollywood and rookie Justin Timberlake.

The metamorphosis of Justin Timberlake over the past few years will surely quadruple the film's exposure. He's finally released some music that hasn't been totally written off by the serious music press, adding many new fans to the hordes of maturing NSYNC groupies. The word is still out on whether irony or true enjoyment is to blame for his rise in popularity.

As for acting, he's not horrible. During the exposition, he appears as comedic relief, some of it unintentional. Lifting weights during a yo mamma scene, smoking weed during a suck my $!*% scene. Basically, he's pretty boy furniture. Throughout most of the movie, he doesn't matter at all. The fact that Timberlake can convincingly play a stoned So Cal surfer type is not that impressive.

But as you watch Timberlake in his final scene, he slowly, and with the methodology of someone who thinks he can't turn back, tapes up the mouth of the young boy he is about to kill. His goofiness is shed at this point: he is the same stoned out kid for whom "bitch" is a word with multiple uses. He is about to become a real, hardcore criminal and he is not sure how to behave. Maybe I've caught the same bug everyone else caught, this "Justin Timberlake is now cool" flu, but I think you'll leave the theatre at least respecting him.

I really want Alpha Dog to be viewed as a true crime dramatization and nothing more. But that's impossible. It will be compared to movies of the "bad kids" ilk. It will be viewed as a mirror to some bigger problem in our country. In the end you don't watch the film as a meditation on crime and punishment, which would have made the whole thing more enjoyable. Cassavetes wants this movie seen as a social critique of suburbia.

Bully told its true life suburban teenage double cross with extreme brutality, the graphicness of its sexual violence forcing me to look away from the screen. Thirteen, obviously more feminine, tried to offer insight and familiarity into what seem to be bland, age specific problems. What is Alpha Dog's entry into the youth film lexicon? Well, Bruce Willis is going to send you down the wrong road in the opening scene when he declares, "This is all the fault of bad parenting." That is the determined sociological undercurrent surging through the movie, the directors' insistence that there is a fall guy, and I don't think any of you are going to care. A scapegoat for our social ills will in no way make this a better movie. The only thing society, as a great intangible being, has to do with this movie is that it can't provide a way to keep everybody out of trouble at all times. But remember one thing: it's trouble that makes the best story.

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