FALLING DOWN
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1993 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: Michael Douglas plays the kind of
angry, hard-hitting role his father would have played. After
being pushed and chafed by society, one day he just decides
to fight back at all the small annoyances that degrade the
quality of life. That may make him a villain but, as with
Bernard Goetz, it is hard to condemn him. Rating: high +1
(-4 to +4).
Life is a sort of social contract. You put in your work at school and then in your career. You pay your dues and you expect to be paid back with a reasonable level of happiness. You expect to reap the rewards of your work. You expect to live in a society where the rules seem to make sense and where justice prevails. And, of course, all those expectations are in varying degrees wrong. If you walk places where you have a right to walk, you are very liable to be beaten and robbed. If you go into a convenience store, you very often find prices are just too darn high. The hamburger may look good and juicy in the picture, but when you actually get it, it is flat, dried out, and unsavory.
Michael Douglas plays "D-Fens," a 30-something nerd with a crewcut who by his accounting is just not getting his fair share out of life. His marriage has gone sour, his career has gone sour, and life just seems to have picked him to dump on. On a hot day in Los Angeles with traffic at a total standstill, he abandons his car and sets off on foot to get to his daughter's birthday party and at the same time just let everybody know that he is fed up. Today he is going to make sure he gets satisfaction. Overcharge him, and be prepared to have him take your store apart. Push him and he is going to push back. Cheat him only in peril of your life. Then there is Prendergast (played by Robert Duvall). On Prendergast's last day of police work, he becomes fascinated by a string of incidents that he can plot in a line on a map. Somebody is fighting back against all the indignities of life, the same ones that frustrate Prendergast, and Prendergast has to stop him before he gets in serious trouble.
FALLING DOWN is an angry howl against the deterioration in the quality of life we all face. Joel Schumacher directing from Ebbe Roe Smith's script has created a villain cut from the same cloth as Bernard Goetz. It is hard not to sympathize with Douglas's angry man. It would be easy to identify Douglas's character with one political wing or the other, but as he goes from venting his anger on a Korean grocer, to Latino gang members, to a neo-Nazi, and finally to rich, selfish, over-paid whites, we see Douglas as surprisingly center-of-the-road. He is a Moderate who has run fresh out of moderation. This is a protest film that could have been made in the 1960s. (My wife, I, and Vincent Canby independently thought to compare it to THE SWIMMER.) Only toward the end does FALLING DOWN lose its power and become somewhat prosaic. But the film is angry and takes chances few Hollywood films are anxious to take anymore. I rate it a high +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
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