director
Joel Schumacher
screenwriter
Ebbe Roe Smith
producers
Timothy Harris
Arnold Kopelson
Herschel Weingrod
cinematographer
Andrzej Bartkowiak
music
James Newton Howard
editor
Paul Hirsch
cast
Michael Douglas (William Foster/D-FENS)
Robert Duvall (Prendergast)
Barbara Hershey (Beth)
Tuesday Weld (Amanda)
Rachel Ticotin (Sandra)
Frederic Forrest (Surplus Store Owner)
Lois Smith (D-FENS' Mother)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 113m
u.s.
release: February 26,
1993
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
other joel
schumacher films
reviewed on this website:
- batman
forever
- batman
and robin
- 8mm
- phone
booth
- a
time to kill
- veronica
guerin
|
Like
most movies designed to be debated on the op-ed page, Falling
Down doesn't live up to its negative hype. It's been called
dangerous and borderline racist, a charge it narrowly deflects
by showing one good Hispanic cop for every Hispanic punk, and
so on. It has also been called a powerful black comedy, but considering
the true classics of black comedy we've produced (Dr. Strangelove
being the pinnacle), it's an embarrassing assessment -- an indication
of how far movies have sunk. Falling Down, despite some
scenes of humor and poignance, is a mess -- a crude, cathartic
rant that both condemns and exploits modern paranoia. Director
Joel Schumacher (Flatliners) has made a Joe for
the '90s, which will seem as overblown and rabble-rousing 20
years from now as Joe seems today.
Michael Douglas, by now an ace at acting out our less acceptable
fantasies (Fatal Attraction, The War of the Roses,
Basic Instinct), keeps the movie going all by himself.
As Bill Foster, a bitter, laid-off defense worker whom the cops
nickname D-FENS after his license plate, Douglas wears a brittle
brush-cut that makes him look like a No. 2 pencil without the
eraser; he also sports glasses whose chunky black frames seem
to be squeezing the brains out of his head. For the first reel
or so, we're locked inside his anger. When D-FENS sits trapped
in a Los Angeles traffic jam, hounded by a buzzing fly and sweating
in misery, we feel his prickly frustration; when he abandons
his car, it's a sweet release. Douglas, who has always seemed
the least relaxed of actors, plays this wordless scene as a pantomime
of gut tension.
Once D-FENS goes on the warpath, Falling Down becomes
shrill and incoherent. D-FENS plans to go home to his ex-wife
(Barbara Hershey) and celebrate his little daughter's birthday.
But everyone in L.A. -- a Korean store-owner who won't give him
change for a phone call; two Hispanics who pull knives on him
-- stands in his way. Threatened, he lashes out. Is he nuts,
or just mad as hell? He keeps insisting on his right as an American
to be left alone, but he seems to be looking for convenient
targets for his rage. You'd have to get that impression from
Douglas' performance, because the script (credited to Ebbe Roe
Smith) presents D-FENS as a generally decent guy, prone to temper,
who blows off a little steam at people who deserve it. We're
meant, I think, to cheer him on even as we recoil. The movie
is a cartoon Taxi Driver -- only assholes feel the brunt
of the psycho's fury.
In a subplot, a cool-headed desk-jockey cop named Prendergast
(Robert Duvall) rides out his last day before an early retirement
and finds himself pulled into the vortex of D-FENS' activities.
This half of the film is awful, despite an honorable and detailed
turn by Duvall. As Prendergast gets deeper into the case, his
shrewish, neurotic wife (Tuesday Weld) keeps shrieking at him
over the phone. The script provides a plausible reason for her
sad craziness (their daughter died at age two), but Schumacher
treats her cruelly. Are we meant to sympathize with her, or with
Prendergast for putting up with the crazy bitch? Between her
and D-FENS, the film seems to say that the best way to handle
a mentally ill loved one is to chuckle indulgently or turn your
back.
Meanwhile, back on the streets, D-FENS raises the stakes. Toying
with a bazooka, he blows up a truck. Offended by a man who wants
to use a pay phone, he takes a machine gun and shoots the hell
out of that goddamn phone. (That's telling him.) The only
person he kills outright is a Nazi surplus-store owner (Frederic
Forrest), whose every syllable is a harangue against -- you guessed
it -- niggers, queers, and kikes. "You and me are the same,"
he leers to D-FENS, who looks disgusted. Overwritten and overacted,
the character comes along at just the right time to establish
that there are bad neo-fascists, who gloat over cans that once
held the gas that killed the Jews, and then there are good
neo-fascists, who do funny, intelligent things like busting up
Korean-owned stores. Falling Down plays it every which
way.
Douglas, however, keeps his integrity. In a scene that will no
doubt be included in some future Michael Douglas montage on television,
Douglas strides into a fast-food joint and orders breakfast.
When told that breakfast isn't served after 11:30 (it's 11:34),
Douglas puts on a spectacular show of venomous sarcasm and menace;
it's like Jack Nicholson's famous diner scene in Five Easy
Pieces, only with firearms. Later, when Prendergast interrupts
D-FENS' reunion with his family and D-FENS discovers he can't
go home again, we feel a hard stab of compassion when he croaks,
"I'm the bad guy? How did that happen?" The
minute D-FENS abandons his car, Douglas seems to abandon the
script, with all its cynical murk, and forge ahead to create
a character far more deeply imagined than the movie surrounding
him. |
