Rent Falling Down (1993)

Douglas is electric brilliance in a stark tale about sadness & anger running rampant & uncontrolled - Falling Down review by TB

Falling Down is a film which it is clear is many different things to many different people. Fiercely controversial on its release, it still today is one of the most prominent & praised of Michael Douglas's career, mainly due to the enormous risk he as an A-List actor took with the subject matter. For me, it is many things, including a black comedy & morality tale, but there is one thing which stands out above everything else & which elevates the film from good to great: the total lack of enjoyment the protagonist has in/during his rampage.

William "D-Fens" Foster is a seemingly mild-mannered & dull middle-aged man. One day, in the scorching hot LA heat whilst stuck in a neverending traffic jam, his car air conditioning fails. For him, this is the final straw, resulting in him abandoning his car & setting off on foot across town to get to his daughter's birthday party. Along the way, he encounters the many trivial annoyances which are a part of life but which Foster will no longer tolerate, whether it is being harassed for money or given poor & demeaning service in a restaurant. He also repeatedly laments the state of the world, whether in constantly rising food prices or criminal behaviour.

In other "revenge/rampage" films, what you often find is that the protagonist will, whilst at first be hesitant or uneasy in some ways about what they are doing, begin to enjoy the violence/terror they inflict on others. But Falling Down offers no such adrenaline rush, as well as no easy answers. And in our protagonist, we have a man who is not only full of boiling rage, but also unbearable sadness & patheticness.

And as has been commented on by Douglas & the screenwriter Ebbe Roe Smith, what Foster is over & above everything else is what so many in America at that time were: precariously employed/only a couple of paychecks away from poverty, coupled with an anger that they had done everything right & had nothing to show for it.

The other point which the story hammers home, alongside Foster's total disenfranchisement of his actions, is how disgusted he is by the sort of people whose opinions & views would normally be associated with this type of behaviour. So when a racist & homophobic Neo-Nazi praises him, Foster quickly & clearly tells him exactly what he thinks of him & the evilness of his beliefs. This again makes this so much more than just a simple revenge film.

But despite Douglas's incendiary performance, don't think for a second that Robert Duvall is sidelined. In what could have been the standard, clichéd burnt-out cop on his last day before retirement is turned on its head. Prendergast very quickly realises that the situation is far more dangerous & combustible than his superiors understand, as well as knowing he is far more competent & able than his colleagues treat him. The pursuit becomes a genuine cat-and-mouse chase, resulting in a showdown which you genuinely don't see coming.

And when you get to the final scene, again there is no catharsis, no rush of adrenaline. You find yourself taking a step back, looking at your own life & thinking that if the cards had fallen differently, you could be that guy (just to be clear, I don't mean going on a violent rampage, I mean being in those circumstances with no hope.)

Falling Down is a film which takes a great big mirror & firmly turns it on you, forcing you to not only examine the world around you, but how you react to it. Which is what great cinema should always do