Ray Pride

While promos for "Alpha Dog" may suggest a drive-by mashup of white gangsta wannabes and the seamier predilections of Larry Clark, it's actually pretty terrific: a loopy, loping Altmanesque picaresque about a terrible crime committed by clueless teenagers.

Though Cassavetes is inevitably compared to his late father, John, Nick's embrace of both the bathos of undying love in "The Notebook" and the run-amok testosterone and pathos here shows him to be a different craftsman of emotional extremes. "Alpha Dog" refashions a true-life San Gabriel Valley teen-murder case into seventy-two hours in the life of Johnny Truelove (Emile Hirsch, playing a slow thug so well), a hard-partying drug dealer who constantly humiliates Jake Mazursky (eye-popping Ben Foster) a hopped-up member of his posse. Getting revenge for a violent outburst by Jake, Truelove's other cohorts (including a very good turn by Justin Timberlake), take Mazursky's 15-year-old brother, Zack (quietly charismatic Anton Yelchin) hostage. It's fun and games with "hostage boy" for a while--all the cool girls think he's cute as can be--but we know from the start the kid is doomed, despite all the sex, drugs and kickboxing that freely flow.

Having teenagers around sometimes fixes filmmakers on subjects like this. "Yeah. Sure," the affable, six-foot-five-and-a-half Cassavetes, father of three, including a 19- and a 21-year-old, tells me, tugging at the brim of his Chicago Cubs cap. "I mean, you're reminded. But my dumb ass always thinks that I'm the teenager! When I heard about the story, I was reminded of my own childhood and how difficult that period of adjustment from youth to adulthood is, and some of the stupid situations I got myself in. I mean, there but for the grace of God, y'know? People look at my movie and they'll be like, `Well, it's very similar to other movies.' And you think, `Yeah, they still haven't gotten that pesky problem of teenagers in trouble, they haven't really cured that one yet.' [And] the fact that my daughter went to school with the victim--she was younger than he was by a couple of years, but it was a big story amongst those kids."

The real-life accused kidnapper-killer's name, Jesse Hollywood, is a great character name, but for legal reasons, the 47-year-old writer-director had to change it to the equally satisfying "Johnny Truelove," which people are always calling out: "Truelove!" "Truelove!" like it's around the corner. "My brother was in the service and there was a kid named `Truelove.' And I always thought, `Wow, what a great name!' Truelove! I wanted to be named Truelove!"

"Alpha Dog" has the slightest of back-story. Cassavetes lets the actions that hurtle toward the boy's doom define the characters. Plus, Altman-style, Cassavetes has dialogue and action filtering around the loosely held widescreen frames. "It sounds pretty fuckin' dubious" is one choice line, as well as the exchange, "Dude, this shirt is cool, Bob Marley is cool, you kidnapping is not fucking cool." Why this distance from heated material? "I wanted to be careful that the bad guys didn't twist their mustaches and the victims didn't have halos around their head. Some people say, `Well, you glorify these killers.' I didn't glorify them, I told what they did. I think the audience has to decide. [These teenagers] just didn't have the facilities or the capabilities to deal with what was happening to them. The [road] was getting narrow, and they didn't have the nerve to say, `Hold on a minute. Shut up! This is stupid. Even if we go to jail, this is dumb, let's cut our losses here.' To be fair to these kids, it was a perfect storm of circumstance. It was just, `Are you kidding?' Any of these kids at the party, they knew the kid was kidnapped. Call your parents! Say there's a kidnapped kid there, that I think this is wrong! If the movie gives you anything, it's `Identify the perfect storm and don't be part of it.'"

Some reviewers' heads will surely explode that Nick made "The Notebook," then "Alpha Dog." "I'm not gonna tell this movie the way I tell 'The Notebook.' I believe in everlasting love, I really do, I love [that] movie. I apologized to all my male friends for making that movie, but I also like this. I'm really interested in the excess of youth and how people that were basically not bad people could get themselves into such a monstrous situation. My buddy Dave Thornton says to me, `Nick, you don't watch this movie, you endure it.' And I think he's right. Actually, I like when people don't like my movies. I think it's great. I think about my movies. I'm pretty clear on how, what they are, and what they're not, when I release them. And the fact that it polarizes people, people take some kind of offense to it, that's great. People should talk about movies that way. Every single movie I've ever done, they've annihilated me and then some people have liked it.

"People don't like it, tough shit! I don't mean to sound like I'm an idiot, but I've made five movies, I know what movie the audience probably wants to see. When it comes with conflict with what I want to do or those pesky details like the truth, the audience has to look at a different type of film. I'm quite aware of it. I have a sex scene after a murder. Usually that doesn't work. But that's the point. The things that were working for him, all that stuff that you really might have enjoyed seeing early, it doesn't work anymore. Man, the kid's dead. He's dead."

"Alpha Dog" opens Friday.

(2007-01-09)

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