FALLING DOWN directed by Joel Schumacher.
Baser Instincts
Readers will recognize my affection for Thomas Hobbes, the gloomy l7th century English philosopher who held that the social contract was forged lest our exuberant native viciousness destroy us. Throughout history, art invoking liberal humanist assumptions of our essential benevolence has been mocked by high (and especially) low art favoring Hobbes' rancid assessment of human nature in the raw.
The Hobbesian vision of universal aggressivity, exploitation, and greed is encountered in literature diverse as the savage Poe of HOPFROG and the nauseous E.C. horror comics of my youth (TALES FROM THE CRYPT, THE HAUNT OF FEAR, so forth). It has been acted on the stages of Seneca, the Jacobean revenge tragedians, the dark Shakespeare (TITUS ANDRONICUS), the Grand Guignol. Due to Hollywood's chronic optimism, the Hobbesian perspective has surfaced but fitfully at the Bijou. I have elsewhere interpreted it in ALIEN, FULL METAL JACKET, UNFORGIVEN, and -- above all -- in PSYCHO, that nihilistic masterpiece which sent up every bland Tinseltown hope for a tidy moral order. Comes before us now FALLING DOWN, a Hobbesian fable aimed at these bleak times.
Michael Douglas owns a narrower range than his father, and also doesn't quite possess Kirk Douglas' startling good looks -- the eye is duller, with a tight, even mean quality about the mouth. In recent years, he has carved out a formidable career exploiting his limitations and bellying up to Hobbes.
With the industry clout to chose his roles, Douglas increasingly has opted for the devious opportunists (as in FATAL ATTRACTION, WALL STREET, THE WAR OF THE ROSES) his father played occasionally (as in CHAMPION). In BASIC INSTINCT and the earlier BLACK RAIN he portrayed marginal cops. In FALLING DOWN, as a canned white collar worker tossed into the urban jungle, he passes well over the margin to assume Hobbesian man's proper stance -- explosive paranoia.
FALLING DOWN unfolds over one blistering Los Angeles day, viewed through a urinous miasma of pollution (strong work by veteran photographer Andrzej Bartkowiak). Douglas' anonymous character (he will be known mainly by his license plate -- D-FENS) is trapped in an appalling traffic sprawl, surrounded by repellant commuters (a woman runs her tongue loathsomely over garish lipstick; a bellicose yuppie bellows biz into his cellular phone) and their offensive impedimenta (a Garfield doll flashes an imbecile leer; a bumpersticker proclaims: "If You Don't Like My Driving, Call l--8OO--EAT SHIT!").
Something definitively snaps in D-FENS' heart and head. He steps out of his car, tells the incensed customer behind him, "I'm going home...", and walks off the freeway. The home he phones is a tatty seaside bugalow where the ex-wife who wants no part of him says she'll exercise a court order to keep him away from his daughter (it's her birthday). Undaunted, this unlikely Ulysses, with his absurdist 5Os middle management uniform -- weird razorcut,
dweeb glasses, wimp shortsleeves, dork pen protector -- embarks on a tortuous odyssey to reclaim his family and savaged pride. He travels through a corrupted cityscape, where dire poverty rubs elbows with grossest wealth.
The virulent mistrust which tainted sexual relationships in FATAL ATTRACTION and BASIC INSTINCT now infects contact at large in FALLING DOWN. Everyone is in each other's face, on D-FENS' case, merely rude or down-and-dirty vicious: a Korean grocer who won't make change; a gang of Chicanos who obscenely demand tribute for crossing their blasted turf; the vacuous twits at a McDonald clone who won't serve him breakfast because it's three minutes into lunch; a rabid Neo-nazi war surplus store owner who mistakes him for a fellow yahoo; a zillionaire old Nixonite who nearly brains him from the tee for daring to cross his golf course.
Each confrontation is immediately charged with maximum misunderstanding and a bristling lust for getting even (revenge is a ruling principle of the Hobbesian world, offering shaky redress against the hurtfulness of fate or one's fellow predators). His space invaded by abrasive invective and increasingly lethal weapons, D-FENS turns the tables, disarms his adversaries; deploys an eerily reasonable tone backed by bat, knife, gun, bazooka, to teach a Quantico course in common courtesy and respect for dead heartland values. Ruin and murder attend his progress.
D-FENS' trail is picked up by Prendergast, a cop on the verge of retirement. The policeman's lot mirrors D-FENS' predicament (a bit too tidily). Confined to desk duty by wounding on the mean streets, he endures a daily round of petty harassment from contempuous colleagues and a contemptible superior. His 2 year old daughter has died mysteriously from respiratory arrest; his once beautiful wife is a corpulent nag. But unlike his quarry, he's handled his burdens with wry stoicism;, suffers an abundance of fools with unflagging grace and good humor.
Prendergast winkles out D-FENS' identity: Bill Foster, a laid-off missile designer gone to ground in his unhinged mother's house, where his father's purple heart is proudly displayed, and repressed violence hangs in the dusty air of a grim little bedroom which could belong to any redblooded American Eagle scout assassin.
Prendergast fingers Foster's wedding ring and a photo of his family. Robert Duvall's unerstated skilfulness makes one start viscerally at Prendergast's recognition that he's stumbled upon a man capable of expunging the love objects he can no longer rule. "I'm the bad guy? How'd that happen?" asks D-FENS later, on the pier where he's been tracked down and cut off from his terrified wife and child. "I did everything I was supposed to! They lied to me!" "Hey, they lie to everybody!" replies the not uncompassionate cop, before being forced into a shootout with an adversary toting a kid's plastic water pistol.
Joel Schumacher comes to Hollywood from art and fashion. He's directed a series of designer movies -- ST. ELMO'S FIRE, THE LOST BOYS, FLATLINERS -- with the same high gloss and dead center. The first time around FALLING DOWN has the bold, meretricious sizzle of other Schumacher efforts. On second sight, it's strangely lifeless, after the fashion of so many big, bad action McMovies which bear the resemblance to genuine cinematic sustenance the Whammiburgers arousing D-FENS' wrath do to real food. Allusions abound to other worthier films (8 1/2, NETWORK, THE SWIMMER, LONELY ARE THE
BRAVE -- and THEY LIVE!, John Carpenter's much more interesting riff on the decline of American enterprise several years back). These references possess slim aesthetic resonance; seem intended to confer a hallmark of excellence or at least success, by association.
Ebbe Roe Smith's script may originally have held promise. Single scenes are potent -- the fiasco in the fastfood joint, D-FENS' scorching encounter with Frederick Forrest's ferocious fascist. Otherwise, one is left with the drearily familiar impression of material with some bite and complexity sacrificed by Hollywood committee in favor of the usual by-the-numbers genre fix. What begins as a not uncompelling cultural critique of malaise
bred out of the Reagan/Bush years of junkbond wretched excess, degenerates into one more scenario where a disaffected but dedicated cop gets the "bad guy".
The bad guy in this case is an urban vigilante, son of DEATH WISH -- an added genre enticement. Merely confused or shamelessly manipulative, FALLING DOWN wants to have it politically both ways, attacking the right (watch for a subliminal Clinton poster), while applauding decerebrate populist/right retribution. Audiences I twice sat with clearly were responding at the DEATH WISH level.
Perhaps viewers eventually wake up to the fact that Douglas' character is a repugnant nut, perhaps not. Either way, a deal of Hobbesian rocks have been gotten off, as D-FENS goes about trashing the punks, sleazebags and assorted belligerants who daily assail one's sensibilities. In the process, monster bucks have stuffed the pockets of FALLING DOWN's McMoviemakers, who beheld the capitalist beast lurking in its lair through a glass darkly, only to become what they beheld.
The picture has predictably provoked a storm of protest over its supposed minority bashing. Actually, FALLING DOWN's bilious take embraces its middle-class hero as well as race and class stereotypes across the board, except for African-Americans (perhaps under the cynical assumption that Koreans or Latinos don't wield as much box-office clout).
The film's unconscious (and overlooked) mysogeny is vastly more troubling. It's manifested not only in the narrative, but in the harsh visuals of Barbara Hershey, Lois Smith, and Tuesday Weld (Schumacher renders Smith and Weld into unappetizing grotesques). While due note is taken that D-FENS' nastiness obtained before his unemployment, Hershey's wife appears cold, offputting, subtly blameworthy. It's obscurely intimated that the dotty patriotism and paranoia of D-FENS' mother (Smith) underpin his own eruption into lunacy.
Prendergast's hectoring wife (Weld) is unobscurely depicted as seriously in need of a firm patriarchal hand. In the end, the mild-mannered cop profanely orders her to have his dinner ready, to the special satisfaction of his sympathetic female partner (in effect, she's a buddy in drag). He then advises D-Fens to submit to a bankrupt status quo before killing him. An unmistakeable recipe for family abuse is insidiously dished up here, with a rather horrible sense of a torch being passed. The working stiff may have to put up with crap in the marketplace. But, by God, he can still crack the whip at home.