Alpha Male (2006) DVD

Alpha Male

Alpha Male is a story of family life: of bad parenting, family politics, repressed emotions, great love and devastating loss. When Jim Ferris dies, leaving behind a family fractured by his absence, his young son Jack is prematurely burdened with the responsibility of looking after the family. When Jim�s widow Alice meets and marries a new man, a firm wedge comes between Jack and the rest of the family. It is another eleven years before the rifts can even begin to heal as they all come together again for Jack�s 21st birthday weekend.

Starring	Patrick Baladi, Arthur Duncan, Christopher Egan, Jennifer Ehle
Director	Dan Wilde
Studio	VERVE PICTURES
Run time	DVD: 1 hr 40 mins
Certificate
Genres	Drama
Language	DVD: English
Released	DVD: 22 Jan 2007 Production year: 2006
Format	DVD

Most helpful member's review of Alpha Male
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6 out of 6 people found this review helpful

[Highly rated reviewer]

Time Present and Time Past

An English Country House family drama centreing on a bereavement which pretty well screws a whole family up in a low-key, very civilised Middle Class way. The film moves backwards and forwards in time, following threads, drawing parallels and showing the characters at different points in their lives. It's well plotted and very nicely played, with touching performances by Jennifer Ehle, Patrick Baladi and two very good child actors. Yes, it's 'slow', whatever that means, but unlike the other reviewers, I wasn't bored.
- - FrankIV
  - Posted 04 Mar 2007 16:09
Most recent members' review of Alpha Male
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3 out of 4 people found this review helpful

[Highly rated reviewer]

Interesting, but not especially enlivening

One's heart sinks to discover another British film stuck in the bourgeois rut of a country house and posh people's problems, but Wilde's film unspools in a manner slightly more interesting than just another Merchant-Ivory knock-off. Perhaps taking his cue from 'Accident', the writer-director keeps everything very low-key, switching back and forth between two time-frames, trying to dissect why an apparently idyllic family fell apart, and what might put them back together again.

That much is interesting, but the clunking symbolism, the obvious parallels drawn between those two time-frames, and a refusal to acknowledge that anything else might have happened to these people over the intervening ten years, do mean that the film has precious little intellectual underpinning. It's fine to watch, but it falls apart as precipitately as the tree-house once you think about it afterwards.

It should be said, however, that Dan Wilde campaigned to have his name removed from the released version, since it had, apparently, been extensively recut by producer Trudie Styler (who also appears in the film, as the dead-eyed aunt), and he no longer considered it his film. So who's to say it might not once have been much better?
- - Savage from London, England
  - Posted 18 Jun 2007 16:01
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