ALPHA DOG (Nick Cassavetes, 2006)

Superficial though (for some of its protracted length) entertaining juvenile melodrama about the Jesse James Hollywood mess in California that led to the kidnapping and murder of the 15-year-old brother of a punk who owed Hollywood, a drug dealer, money. For legal reasons, all the names have been changed, with Hollywood, for example, now being called Johnny Truelove, and his eventual capture taking place in Paraguay instead of Brazil.
     Writer-director Nick Cassavetes, son of you-know-who and you-know-who-else, creates gorgeous compositions but has only a half-hearted cautionary tale in mind. This is an unnecessary movie.
     That said, two of the performances rock: as the brothers Markowitz, now called Mazursky, Ben Foster and Anton Yelchin. Emile Hirsch, a Leonardo DiCaprio-lookalike, is a middling Truelove, while two other actors are perfectly dreadful: Justin Timberlake as one of the kidnappers (Timberlake does everything too selfconsciously, at too slow a pace) and Sharon Stone, who is in her full-throttle Joan Crawford-mode as the too-doting mother of the kidnapped boy.

UNKNOWN SOLDIER (Ferenc Tóth, 2004)

Unknown Soldier was written and directed by Ferenc Tóth. It is about an 18-year-old boy who, once evicted from their Harlem apartment after his father’s death, ends up on the streets. Tóth himself had lived in Harlem and wanted to make a film about those he knew there.
     It begins in “set-up” mode. A party scene establishes the amiable protagonist as sociably “connected.” His father, an automobile mechanic, lends his son money for “the last time” when Ellison (“L”) has already exhausted his income from his new job at the pet shop. We watch the overweight father overeating fatty food and, huffing and puffing, barely making it up the stairs to his apartment. He is a heart attack, then, waiting to happen, and the broad, idyllic strokes with which the father-son relationship is painted, combined with the emphatic treatment of the state of the father’s health, help create an air of unreality. Redemptive: the unexplained absent mother. But something else reverses the clumsy first impression Tóth has made: Whereas earlier L had zipped through his tasks at work, now we see him lumbering through these. Because he is carrying the weight of his father’s loss, L appears prematurely old. Tóth expressively holds his digital video camera on the boy’s back as L, after work, slowly disappears into the night.
     L’s scramble to survive includes trying to enlist in the Army. The long delay of this attempt shows L resisting the cliché that would certify his humiliation, and protesting the meager opportunities available for African-American youth. Ironically, L is rejected on medical grounds, because he is asthmatic, and in retrospect one wonders if asthma contributed to his father’s death. L slides into criminal activity. A subsequent decision, however, reverses the slide—morally, at least.
     Trenchant film.

FAREWELL, HOME SWEET HOME (Otar Iosseliani, 1999)

The actual title of the film called in the States Farewell, Home Sweet Home is Adieu, plancher des vaches!, whose English translation would be Farewell, Cow Floor! Nineteenth-century sailors thus commented on the unpleasantness of accommodations they were leaving and expressed hope that their next accommodations would be better—which they hardly ever were. From France, Switzerland and Italy, this whimsical fable reminiscent of Jacques Tati and the later French work of Luis Buñuel and Râúl Ruiz portrays a contemporary Paris of disenchantment, with an Altmanian brace of characters seeking some sort of escape—escape that at least will make their lives more bearable and, hopefully, even transform those lives. Writer-director Otar Iosseliani, a Soviet/Georgian-born student of music and mathematics, received the European Film Critics’ prize for this film.
     Its characters include a wealthy businesswoman (her spouse, played by Iosseliani, keeps to himself and plays with electric trains), the homeless, immigrants, café owners and laborers, other laborers, a veterinarian, an elderly woman who lives by herself and becomes a victim of street thugs upon her return from the bank, etc. Theirs are intricately crisscrossing existences. There are also lots of animals: dogs, a pet stork, a goat.
     At the center of the film’s kaleidoscope of activities is Nicholas, the son of the wealthy couple, who befriends outcasts and washes windows and dishes. Slipping into anonymous unimportance is a way for him to feel “connected.”
     Iosseliani’s film plays with time and space, sparkles with wit, and grows a little thin in its pointed repetitiousness before releasing a conclusive series of surprises.
     Iosseliani prefers distanced shots to closeups, stressing the (sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously) collaborative song of humanity. He offers a different explanation in an interview included on the Facets DVD; but that’s another story.