On occasion you hear about a movie that loses its director, sometimes during preproduction of a movie which is something that can easily be replaced. There are other movies where the director walks out in the middle, sometimes to come back but other times that isn’t the case. The worst however might be the director who gets so disgruntled during the editing process that he completely leaves, never to return. After doing a bit of research on Alpha Male, I found that was exactly the case with Dan Wilde. He may have written and directed the movie, but during the final editing phases of the film, the studio wanted to make the movie more commercially viable and began to retool it in their vision. Wilde meanwhile walked out, asked that his name be removed, and the studio went forward with releasing the film anyway.

After watching the film, I can understand exactly why he would leave. Alpha Male is a jumbled mess of a movie that just can’t decide what direction it wants to go into. The concept, though I’m not sure if it was Wilde’s original idea, follows the life of a very well off family. Jim Ferris (Danny Huston) discovers that he’s ill and has tried to hide it from his family, but eventually his wife Alice (Jennifer Ehle) finds out the truth. Jim soon passes on, leaving Alice with two children to raise, though with their money, it shouldn’t be terribly difficult. Jack (Arthur Duncan) has already been told by his father that there will be a day when he’s the man of the house, and now he’s trying to help his little sister Elyssa (Katie Ann Knight) cope with the loss of their father. Alice begins going to a support group and soon meets Clive Lamis (Patrick Baladi) but Jack isn’t pleased about possibly having a replacement for his father. Elyssa meanwhile is coping with things in a much different way and has become withdrawn.

The film tells the events of the family in a series of flashbacks, though it’s not necessarily noticeable at first. The real premise is an older Jack (now played by Mark Wells) returning home for his birthday, and Elyssa (Amelia Warner) is coming home as well. It really isn’t until the final portion of Alpha Male where the return home is really focused upon and instead, we just see the previous years with a few minor moments of the present of the Ferris family.

I’m sure that whatever Wilde originally had planned would have been fairly interesting, but the edit that the studio has decided to release is beyond being a disaster. Alpha Male become completely boring and sleep inducing within twenty minutes or so, and it simply never lets up. The death of the father is something that really is greeted with not nearly as much emotion and despair was what you might think, though perhaps from the children. However, that becomes a non-issue quite quickly. The struggle apparently is both children blaming their mother for things; though I’m not quite sure how or why they would even think that since it’s really not her fault that their father has died.

Anything that this “commercially successful,” at least in the eyes of the studio, film wanted to accomplish is completely lost. If it’s trying to show a dysfunctional family, it completely drops the ball. Memorable characters are really no where to be found, nor is captivating story telling, good editing, a great visual style, or even a stunning soundtrack. Nothing about Alpha Male really manages to hit home, and having read a few reviews across the internet, that seems to have been the case with a lot of people. Alpha Male serves more as a lesson in why studios should allow the directors to handle their own work and not step in, thinking that they know everything and can make things “better” if they do things their way.

The only bonus feature found on the DVD is the theatrical trailer for the film. That’s not much of a surprise though. The chances of getting director commentary is slim at best, at least it is unless the studio is fine with Wilde bashing them from start to finish, and I’m sure that would have happened. Any making of material was probably in the hands of Wilde himself, so I really don’t think that anyone would have gotten the footage if it did in fact exist.

Alpha Male should serve as an example, not just to movie buffs but to studio executives. When a director has his hands on a script, no matter if he has written it or otherwise, he gets a vision in his head of what the final product should be. This doesn’t mean that changing the way he feels the film should be is necessarily going to work, and if nothing else, history has shown that what studios didn’t think would work in fact has, and better than expected. Lucas was told that American Graffiti wouldn’t work because of his choice of music, and the studio was shown otherwise. There were those who didn’t like Coppola’s approach to The Godfather, but I think we all know how that turned out. Contrary to the name, Alpha Male won’t be the movie that others will follow.

-mike-