Alpha Dog
Directed by Nick Cassavetes
Winston Churchill once said that the Germans are “either at your feet or at your throat.” That’s true as well of the motion- picture industry and its treatment of youth. American movies about kids under 21 are either full of flattery or awash in condemnation. The teenagers we see are either wonderful beyond all measure–or they’re the most pitilessly terrifying creatures to roam the earth since Tyrannosaurus rex.
The horrific new melodrama called Alpha Dog is a prime example of the teen-as-Tyrannosaurus movie. It’s a barely fictionalized account of the kidnapping and murder of a 15-year-old Los Angeles boy whose thuggish older brother got crosswise of a teen drug dealer whose actual given name is Jesse James Hollywood. Three of Hollywood’s compatriots are in prison, and a fourth–the one who hit Nick Markowitz with a shovel and then machine-gunned him to death in a shallow grave–is on death row in California. Hollywood is alleged to have paid his death-row buddy a few hundred bucks to kill the boy. Hollywood got wind of all the arrests, disappeared, and five years later was apprehended in a coastal village in Brazil. He is now in jail awaiting trial.
The release of Alpha Dog was delayed almost a year because Hollywood’s defense lawyer tried to use the film to his advantage. He claimed that writer-director Nick Cassavetes received improper help from the district attorney pursuing Hollywood and that the movie itself would make it impossible for his client to receive a fair trial. The fact that this fugitive from justice–who was secretly supported during his Brazil sojourn by his father, a onetime Little League coach and accused narcotics manufacturer–would even now have high-priced legal talent doing everything possible to keep him from receiving his just deserts is part of the perversely fascinating story Cassavetes tells in Alpha Dog.
Like Hollywood, all the kids in Alpha Dog come from families that are, at the very least, stoutly middle class (a few are rich). Yet they exist in a nearly feral state. As the movie’s title indicates, the boys are basically pack animals. The plot is set in motion when one of the pack challenges the alpha-male status of the Hollywood character–here called Johnny Truelove.
The challenger is Jake Mazursky (Ben Foster, in a towering performance), who comes to Johnny and asks for more time to repay a debt. Johnny tries to establish his physical dominance by pushing Jake through a glass table, only to discover that his rival is tougher, meaner, and stronger than he. Jake’s rage terrifies Johnny, who has to find some way to reestablish his primacy. When he and two of his underlings see Jake’s kid brother Zack (Anton Yelchin) walking down the street, Johnny decides on the spur of the moment to kidnap the boy.
Truelove and his friends take Zack Mazursky to Palm Springs (in real life, the destination was Santa Barbara). At this point, Truelove goes back home and leaves Zack in the custody of his friend Frankie (a very fine Justin Timberlake), whose wealthy father lives in the desert. And for three days, Frankie and Zack basically party together. Zack makes no move to escape, even when Frankie offers to buy him a bus ticket home. Zack says he doesn’t want to get his brother in trouble, but the truth is he seems thrilled to be playing with the older kids. The depiction of these young wolves at play is a cross between an MTV show about spring break and a Hieronymus Bosch depiction of hell. They seem to think they’re having fun, but their world is the last place any sane person would want to be.
Then Johnny calls his lawyer friend to ask what would happen to someone who kidnaps a boy to resolve a debt. Twenty-five to life, the lawyer says. Johnny calls Jake to negotiate, and Jake swears he will hunt Johnny down and kill him like a dog. At which point Johnny decides the best course of action is to have Jake killed and dump his body somewhere in the mountains.
During the movie, Cassavetes keeps a running tally on how many witnesses know something untoward is going on. He ends up at 38, most of them teenagers, many of them aware that Zack is being held captive, sort of. And only one is shown wrestling with her conscience–a girl who seeks her own mother out for counsel, only to be told that her parents are on Ecstasy and don’t want to be bothered.
At this point, the uncompromising and punishing Alpha Dog starts taking on some of the more clichéd aspects of other teen movies. According to all teen movies, if teenagers behave badly, the fault lies not with them but with their parents. The grown-ups are either weak and uncomprehending (Rebel Without a Cause) or they’re indifferent (“What did your parents do to you?” “They ignore me.”–The Breakfast Club) or they’re abusive (every film on the Lifetime channel). Cassavetes offers up a quick and dirty explanation for the bad behavior of all the kids on display here: Johnny’s dad is a drug dealer, too. Frankie’s dad hires hookers and employs him to cure and clean the marijuana grown at the Palm Springs estate. Jake’s mother isn’t nice to him.
But what we are seeing in Alpha Dog isn’t reducible in this manner. This isn’t a representative story of American youth gone awry; it’s not a representative story at all, thank God. Kidnapping, conspiracy, and murder aren’t what happens when people neglect or coddle or aren’t pleasant to their children. Alpha Dog is a spellbinding story not because it is all too familiar but because it’s a portrait of an unfamiliar evil at work in a completely familiar setting.
And it turns out that the most unsettling aspect of the case–the 38 witnesses who do not intervene to save the boy–doesn’t quite get it right. According to news reports, there were numerous calls to 911 that could have guided the police to Nick Markowitz. But the two L.A. police officers on the case were too lazy to check into the leads.
Cassavetes neglects that aspect of the case, and that is unfortunate. But still, Alpha Dog is an extraordinarily impressive piece of filmmaking–a vision of human waste that’s at its best when it’s nearly unbearable.
John Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
