Posted: 01/15/2007

Alpha Dog

(2007)

by Karen Petruska

Nick Cassavetes’s prior directorial venture, the lush romance The Notebook, told a simple but affecting story of young lovers divided by class difference. With that film, Cassavetes gained box office success if not critical respect. Alpha Dog is his follow-up film, and it marks a sharp break with its forebear. This break is not for the good.

Emile Hirsch portrays drug dealer Johnny Truelove, whose success derives less from the size of his own balls than from the hugeness of his father’s, mobster Sonny Truelove (a liver spot-marked but virile Bruce Willis). Hirsch struggles to play a tough; everything about him reeks of poser, from his wardrobe to his comfortable house to his height. To an extent, this may be the point. But Hirsch fails to infuse his character with charm or charisma, leaving the audience without a viable anti-hero.

More believable is Ben Foster as Truelove’s rival Jake. Strung out and increasingly cornered, Jake acts out with violence and brutality. He trashes Truelove’s house (complete with an act of defecation on the carpet) when unable to repay money owed. Truelove responds by kidnapping Jake’s 15-year-old brother, Zach (Anton Yelchin). This kidnapping occurs more than twenty minutes into the film and derives from impulse rather than forethought. For the rest of the movie, Truelove tries to decide what to do with his victim, a young man eager to escape from the indulgence of his over-attentive mother (an overwrought but sympathetic Sharon Stone). Despite Zack’s obvious admiration for his kidnappers, Truelove’s paranoia leads him to hatch a murder plot.

Truelove is aided by his loyal buddies, including Frankie (Justin Timberlake) and Elvis (Shawn Hatosy). Frankie is the funny guy, and as played by the awesomely muscled Timberlake, Frankie is completely likeable if utterly cowardly. Elvis is more dangerous in that he is willing to do anything to earn Truelove’s esteem, as evidenced by an attempt to goad Elvis into sucking Truelove’s cock as proof of his commitment. Watching these little boys talk about cocks, bitches, and joints is about as menacing as Jack Black in King Kong—they just can’t pull it off.

Orgiastic party scenes are much more credible, though the brutal misogyny embedded in virtually every scene made me weep for the complicit female cast members. In Alpha Dog, women are to be fucked and discarded as desired, and they are happy to make themselves sexually available for any man who gives them a moment’s attention. Every so often, one of the girls gets ornery. For example, Susan (Dominique Swain) has the nerve to be outraged that Truelove and Co. have kidnapped a human being. Her screeching rants are ineffective because no man in this film ever listens to a woman. Worse, she never backs up her statements with action. The girls may bitch and moan, but ultimately, they are rendered as dickless as Truelove and his gang.

Timberlake pulls off his acting role, playing the morally torn Frankie. His genuine affection for Zach renders the disturbing climax positively devastating. Foster is brilliant as Jake, the fucked-up antagonist, though I felt seriously let down by Cassavetes’ underuse of him in the final half hour of the film. As Zach, Anton Yelchin is completely adorable and therefore completely effective. His desire to hang with the guys lends the film a compelling tension when it becomes obvious that Truelove has no mercy for those who get in his way.

Cassavetes attempts to infuse the film with style through music and split screens. The former reminds us that the white boys on screen fall short of their heavily marketed gangster models, and the latter fails to punctuate the storytelling and therefore seems superfluous. Lacking the movement and spontaneity of a music video, the film proceeds in a largely linear and predictable narrative fashion. Cassavetes attempts to breed curiosity with text that appears to mark every witness to Truelove’s crime, but this serves little purpose.

Without style or substance, Cassavetes has little to offer other than some pretty actors and a couple of good performances. His vision is weak, without nuance or complexity, and entirely devoid of the hip factor. In every way that The Notebook was sincere, Alpha Dog is disingenuous. Cassavetes attempts to depict a harsh world composed of desperate characters. But the real desperation is in Cassavetes, trying too hard to lose his stench of privilege.

Karen Petruska is a film critic living in Chicago.

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