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| images courtesy of Arrow Video |
“I’m the bad guy? How’d that happen? I did everything they told me to.”
- Bill Foster (D-FENS)
Falling Down is one of those movies that sneaks up on you, just like the main character’s revelation at the end. It was released in 1993 to middling fanfare: No Oscar nominations, no real major award consideration, yet Michael Douglas considers this his best performance, and the film was green-lit based on his own love of Ebbe Roe Smith’s screenplay, calling it one of the best he’d ever read. Prior to Douglas discovering this gem, producer Arnold Kopelson considered sending it to the purgatory of straight-to-cable slop, because every other studio passed on it. Can you imagine Joel Schumacher’s masterpiece being thrown together by a creative team whose best work includes movies like Mansquito or Frankenfish? It’s a nauseating thought.
From the phenomenal opening shots, edited together by the masterful Paul Hirsch, Falling Down embroils us in a pressure cooker that continues to build steam and momentum throughout its runtime. The story is simple: An ordinary man embarks on just another day, stuck in an everyday traffic jam, but there’s one problem: He’s simply had one bad day too many. You know those dark thoughts many of us have when we’re stuck in traffic, the fast food joint just stopped serving breakfast three minutes ago, or rude people intrude on our solitude with the sledgehammer of attitude and entitlement? Well, he begins acting on those urges instead of forcing them deep down until he one day dies of a heart attack, wondering how he ever made it this far. Douglas’ performance as D-FENS is the centerpiece of the film. Everything depends on it. And he’s right: This is the best performance he’s ever given. He may have won an Oscar for Wall Street, but Falling Down is the one many will think of first whenever his name is mentioned.
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| images courtesy of Arrow Video |
Formerly a defense contractor for the government, hence the personalized license plate on his vehicle, D-FENS committed the cardinal sin many of us commit as adults: He let his job come to define him. When your “personalized” license plate is just another extension of your occupation, how personal is it? To paraphrase Roddy Piper in They Live, he believes in America, follows the rules, and understands that we all have our hard times these days. But yet he’s tired. He’s worn out. His wife left him and weaponizes parental alienation to keep him from their daughter, yet freely admits he never really did anything wrong to get evicted from their lives. When D-FENS tells the numerous people who cross his path that he just wants to go home, that’s literally all he wants. The room he occupies with his mother isn’t his home. If home is where the heart is, his home is with Barbara Hershey and their adorable little girl, whose delight at finally seeing her father on her birthday really drives home the knife of the many betrayals D-FENS has endured as an ordinary man who has been crushed into the position of being “not economically viable.”
D-FENS is a hell of a character to hinge your movie on, so it’s essential that we have a foil to hold up a mirror for the audience, and we get that in Robert Duvall as the almost-retired Sergeant Prendergast. It’s his last day on the job, but he can’t relax or go home early. Why? This clean cut white guy in a white shirt and tie just keeps popping up in all these witness statements. Like D-FENS, Prendergast is not appreciated at work or at home. His captain, attempting to guilt him into sacrificing another decade of life on the altar of police work, says he’s “not a real cop.” After the death of their little girl (one of many parallels between the two characters), Prendergast’s wife has lost her mind to anxiety. She schizophrenically oscillates between abject terror and senseless cruelty during the many phone conversations they have throughout the film. Prendergast appears to take all this in stride, but we all see how he’s one or two bad days away from grabbing a baseball bat himself. So what sets them apart? Rachel Ticotin as Prendergast’s partner. Unlike Melina from Total Recall, her performance as Sandra is less sleazy and more demure, and reveals an important lesson: Sometimes having the listening ear of just one understanding person can keep us from bridging that gulf between sanity and completely losing our shit.
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| images courtesy of Arrow Video |
This all sounds remarkably dour and serious, and of course it is. Falling Down is a movie that confronts a difficult reality without blinking, without restraint, and without mercy, but it comes fully armed with biting wit, stinging satire, and a sense of humor that triggers some serious belly laughs. All of this is filtered through strong characters we can identify with, and it’s the combination of all these elements working in concert that makes the film so effective. It would be easy to dismiss the film as Schumacher’s typical surface level swill if D-FENS’ grievances weren’t so relatable, especially in a moment when he holds up a cheeseburger and compares its repugnant visage to the Glamour Shot on the menu. Prendergast would just be a stereotypical cop if his arc wasn’t on the exact same path as the man he’s tracking. This is deeply psychological writing, and it was Ebbe Roe Smith’s first screenplay. Talk about starting on a high note. If the movie has a weakness, it’s the enigma surrounding the dissolution of D-FENS’ marriage to Barbara Hershey, but her character is incidental to the main thrust of the narrative, so that’s more of a nitpick than a critique. More decisive answers might leave us with fewer of the important questions this movie wants us to ask ourselves.
Speaking of bravura work, a huge amount of credit must be given to the team at Arrow Video for restoring this movie so beautifully. The cinematography of Andrzej Bartkowiak positively sizzles with literal heat waves, sunbaked browns, and macro shots that sometimes feel uncomfortably close to the action. The DTS 4.0 track isn’t Atmos, but it’s wholly enveloping, much like the 70mm 4.0 audio track on their new Innerspace release (review here). The limited edition UHD disc also includes new interviews and a location featurette, plus an archive commentary with Joel Schumacher, Paul Hirsch, Ebbe Roe Smith, and Michael Douglas. It’s Douglas’ only commentary track other than David Fincher’s The Game. That says a lot about how much he reveres this piece of work, and the good people at Arrow clearly have a love for it as well.
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| images courtesy of Arrow Video |
Falling Down is essential viewing. It’s not often that one can make such a declaration, but here it is. While many fans of Joel Schumacher will say The Lost Boys is the pinnacle of his career as a director, I have to respectfully disagree. While that film is a cultural mainstay and lauds all of the visual style and tropes that would come to define his work, Schumacher really pushed himself to the limit on this one. It’s unfortunate that he would begin destroying his own reputation just two years later with Batman Forever, the worst movie we’ve all seen 20 times. Falling Down shows us that Schumacher was capable of going to dark places, shedding some light in those corners of our psyche, and not filling them with bat nipples. This is his magnum opus, and it ironically teaches us the same lesson learned by its anti-hero: Sometimes the only way to win is to not play by the rules.
- Blake O. Kleiner