...pretty bad when you have to keep pinching your cheeks in order to prevent yourself from nodding off.
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After loading "Alpha Male" into my DVD player and taking in the first few minutes of the film, the only thing that crept into my mind was that I was going to be in for a dreadfully long night. It was one of those instances where I hoped my initial impression was wrong, but sadly this time my intuition happened to be right on the money.
The plot revolves around a dashing man in his early thirties, sporting George Clooney good looks, and consumed by a wave of unrelenting boredom. Oh, wait, I'm confusing this movie with me trying to sit through writer/director Dan Wilde's dawdling stinker of a film. You just know that a movie has to be pretty bad when you have to keep pinching your cheeks in order to prevent yourself from nodding off.
The opening sequence unveils stills of different rooms in a home, void of any life, most likely to symbolize the emptiness in the household after the "Alpha Male" of the Ferris family, Jim (Danny Huston), has passed over to the great beyond. Right off the bat, these clips rubbed me the wrong way, which is probably why I'm in such a foul mood over this film. We see the couch...and wait...and wait...and wait...and then we see the hall...and wait...and wait...and wait...then the kitchen, and so on. I decided to start counting the time lapse for each clip--slowly, I might add--and made it all the way to twelve hippopotamuses. That's the truth, too; I'm not just saying that just to try and get a laugh.
After the agonizing slide show, the real plot of the story kicks in, and this is where we first meet the Ferris clan. Jim is the man of the house, who made a fortune with his packaging company. Jim lives with his wife Alice (Jennifer Ehle) and their two children in a magnificent castle-like mansion complete with personal gardener and swimming pool.
I can't really complain about Jennifer Ehle or her acting, but I would go as far as saying that she was like a piece of Scotch tape barely managing to hold a shattered mess of junk together. Her performance was good as always, and she kind of reminds me of a young Meryl Streep. The only thing is, even the most seasoned performers can't perform miracles and save a movie when the directing and camera work are so sloppy.
The film jumps back and forth by intertwining two timelines, and the application would make Quentin Tarantino's head spin. The first timeline reveals the period leading up to and after Jim's demise, and the second one fast-forwards to a few years later when their now-older son Jack (Mark Wells) returns home to celebrate his twenty-first birthday with a huge classy shindig. It took awhile to determine which timeline I was seeing at any given point, especially the scenes with Alice and her sister Brede (Trudi Styler), because the actresses look almost the same in both periods.
Jim's death understandably would have a devastating effect on his family, as losing a loved one isn't easy for anyone. The movie morbidly spends most of its time, though, on the surviving Ferris members dwelling on their loss and moping around in a state of unbearable depression. This also contributed to extending the movie past its prime, as every other scene had the actors and actresses staring at each other while having very little dialogue. Dramatic tension is important to set the mood of a movie, but overdoing it in this manner gets old pretty quickly.
Eventually, things start to get mildly interesting when Clive (Patrick Baladi) enters the picture. Alice meets him a few months after Jim's passing, and the two hook up. Clive moves in, and while he attempts to be as nice as he can to Alice's kids, knowing that they've just had a traumatic experience, his presence still isn't received well by the children and causes everyone to drift further apart. There are one or two cases of dry British humor that has their moments, but then everything reverts back to the stagnating swamp of glum emotions.
Avearage user rating (1-5):
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Not yet rated.