Falling Down (1993) At time when it was politically incorrect to do so, Joel Schumacher made a move about a white, middle-class man. All the man wants to do is get home for his daughter’s birthday party. And therein lies a story.
Although this is an excellent movie, I cannot imagine most people being interested in it.
Female (yes, half the population)—you might really object. One of the best scenes in the movie is when a level-headed police officer interviews the protagonist’s ex-wife. She’s wondering whether her restraining order prohibits her husband from coming within 100 feet or 100 yards. Did her husband drink? Of course not. Did he do drugs? Definitely not. Did he hurt the little girl? He’d never think of it. Did he strike her? Never, but he sometimes looked peculiar. So he is divorced and unable to see the love of his life, his daughter, and the second love of his life, his ex-wife. In a superb example of editing, the camera remains on the wife and on the police officer, just resting there in silence, inviting the audience to make of it what they will, and hinting that this was a divorce based on slim grounds, that this was a divorce that might have fostered the vary problem it was trying to avoid. I should add that the wife of the detective on the case uses her emotional insecurities to bully her loving husband. Yet the most sympathetic and likeable character in the movie is the young female cop who ends up working the case.
Are you non-white? You could be offended. This guy insults Koreans. When he asks for change for the phone, the shop owner refuses unless he buys something, but a can of Coke is 85 cents which will not leave him a quarter change, and soon the friction escalates to where the protagonist is saying that if Koreans come to America they should have the respect to learn English, and then that the Korean is price gouging his (poor) customers. Chicanos are also insulted. When he apologizes for accidentally trespassing on their gang territory, they refuse to listen to reason and try to steal his brief case. After he beats them off with a baseball bat, they try to gun him down in a drive-by shooting—and miss. Yet when a Nazi army surplus store owner interprets this activity as wonderfully racist, our protagonist is disgusted.
Teenager? You’ll probably be unable to identify with it. He has all the time in the world for no one but children, precisely the people who will not watch this film.
Rich and successful? You’ll have a devil of a time identifying with a guy who was fired from his job designing missiles at the defence plant and has been unable to land work in a month. Like the young black guy picketing in front of the credit union, he is “not economically viable.”
Never known—or forgotten—what traditional American values are? You’ll wonder what all the fuss is about. This dude wants people to be polite. He wants things to be not corrupt. He wants prices to be fair and people to be reasonable. He thinks that marriage should be forever. He thinks that plastic surgeons are worth no more than people who defend the country. He thinks that fathers should be able to see their daughters. He is, in short, out of control! And he’ll get no sympathy from most who see this movie. If you are outside the narrow demographic for this movie and you can still empathize with the main character, you are to be congratulated for making an impressive artistic leap because the movie does not give you a lot of help in bridging the gap.
At some time in his catastrophic attempt to get home to his daughter’s birthday party, he crosses the line from righteous indignation to what might be called nervous breakdown. Spout.com has erroneous “tags” such as “insanity” and “rampage” and “makingyourownrules.”. But there is also the tag “nervous breakdown,” and that is a pretty good guess as to how this guy ends up. What else are you going to call it? Some people would say he snaps right at the first of the movie when he leaves his crappy car stuck in a sweltering traffic jam caused by road construction that does not actually have to be done. In contrast, I’d put the point quite late in the game—certainly when he crosses the elite golf course and taunts the nasty old geezer who tried to hit him with a golf ball as the old guy lies on the fairway fighting heart problems. The protagonist knows and says that somehow he has passed the point of no return. But labelling him is terribly important, because if we can say he cracks and goes on a rampage, then we have dismissed him and all the injustices he rails against. We would then judge the movie on how good the rampage was, and it was tepid. But if we say this is a highly educated, fine, upstanding, middle-class American who wants to attend his daughter’s birthday party, then we have to take seriously the obstacles he encounters to reaching that seemingly simple goal.
One of the obstacles is himself. No, this is not revealed when he trashes the Korean’s deli, or when he beats the thugswith a baseball bat, or when he continues his so-called rampage. His mother says he has changed, sometimes sitting at the dinner table shoveling in food as if he were a machine. The root of his problem is revealed subtly—and he sees it—when he is watching a home video of him, his wife, and his daughter at an earlier birthday. He is saying, in effect, that his daughter will damn well get on the rocking horse and enjoy it because it is her birthday and this is what kids enjoy on their birthdays.
So maybe it’s not even a nervous breakdown. It’s an ordinary, fine, upstanding American guy with a small character flaw. Other character flaws such as murdering children in their beds, gunning down people in drive-by shooting—these are generally not so bad in modern America in this movie. But he is just a little bit rigid on how people should behave—they should speak English (ouch), be polite (ouch), not lord their wealth over others (ouch), value children (ouch), and on and on. This rigidity for old-fashioned values is his Achilles heal. Michael Douglas is superb in the lead role, Barbara Hershey is perfect as his ex-wife, and Robert Duvell is flawless as the hen-pecked desk sergeant involved in his pursuit.
Although this film was nominated for a Golden Palme at Cannes, it received mediocre reviews at home. That is no surprise. As pointed out above, it would appeal readily to a very small demographic. Furthermore, who wants to have their country relentlessly criticized as not being what it once was and claims to be? Of course, critics, even if they realize it, cannot say this is the reason they don’t like the film. Rhetorically, the best strategy for disgruntled critics would be one that acknowledges some strength in the movie but then trashes the movie for some other—maybe spurious—reason. For example, you could say, as Allmovie does, “The denouement is not nearly as spectacular as its build up,” (no support given) and then downgrade it from 5 out of 5 stars to 3 or “neutral,” thus neutering the film. But to a minority of viewers, the movie’s question will remain a burning one: Just what should it take for a man to get home?