“Alpha Dog”: excellent portrayal of hard-core adolescent addicts and the Jesse James Hollywood story
“Alpha Dog” – superb portrayal of adolescent poly-drug addicts
One critic described “Alpha Dog,” Nick Cassavetes’ thinly disguised story of the murder of 15-year-old Nicholas Markowitz for which Jesse James Hollywood is on trial, as a “glossy yet unflinching portrait of violent, hedonistic teenagers.” Johnny Truelove’s (Jesse James Hollywood’s) chain-smoking father Sonny (played by Bruce Willis) suggested “it’s all about parenting,” which is what Cassavetes suggested in several interviews. These are typical takes on a film that is, at its core, really about adolescent poly-drug addiction.
The film is, at first, very difficult to watch. It is filled to the brim with profanities, tattoos, boozing, drugging, violence, screaming, reckless driving and addicts’ confabulations. The codependent (and probably alcoholic) parents are crazed, yet continue to enable. The older son, Jake Mazursky (Ben Markowitz in real life, played by Ben Foster), is the most vile out-of-control methamphetamine addict we’ve seen since “Salton Sea” (starring the great Vincent D’Onofrio). But the story mellows a bit, particularly as we get to know the younger Zack Mazursky (victim-in-real-life Nicholas Markowitz, played by Anton Yelchin), who becomes complicit in naïve fashion in his own abduction. Zack is too endearing and cute to be savagely murdered, even if he seems quite happy to have a taste of the addicts’ decadent lifestyles in the largely party-like atmosphere. (It’s impossible to say with certainty that he inherited addiction. Although he seems to regard his older brother with, as one critic put it, both admiration and envy, this appears to have been his only foray into drug use.) The bond that develops between Zack and Frankie (one of Truelove’s addict friends, played by a surprisingly good Justin Timberlake) also helps to tone the movie down just enough for this reviewer to be able to give it an almost three stars out of four.
But it’s not about lousy parenting, even if non-addicted parents might have intervened before tragedy happened. Nor is it, as another critic said, heavy-panting exploitation of the crime, since reporting the tragic results of addiction help to protect the rest of us, if only we would learn. Another critic suggested that Cassavetes’ suggestion that it’s about lousy parenting is “rot,” instead claiming it’s about “the pleasure of watching beautiful bodies at rest and in motion. It’s about the allure of youth, the erotics of violence and the inevitable comeuppance that must always be meted out whenever youth strays too far from the fold….” As he put it, what rot. The sober among us do not think it alluring or erotic. It’s about the tragedies that can occur when addiction isn’t properly dealt with. The comeuppance all-too-often comes too late.
Epilogue: I learned after first publishing this piece that the kid may have been inaccurately portrayed, perhaps for dramatic purposes. According to a source who knew the family, he was already smoking a lot of pot, doing a lot of pills and had run away several times–which was the reason no one looked for him right away.