Falling Down. - movie reviews

National Review, May 10, 1993 by John Simon

REMEMBER the bad old days when Charles Bronson, in Death Wish (1974), took matters into his own private citizen's hands and eliminated the urban vermin that tried to prey on him? Despite some squawking by liberals, he was considered a hero. In less than twenty years, we have become enlightened. As Michael Douglas, another private citizen, gives the scum what-for in Falling Down, he is considered a nut case even by the filmakers, let alone the Korean and Hispanic protestors demonstrating outside megalopolitan movie houses. The line between justicer and just plain crazy has been categorically crossed. Or has it? The movie waffles breathtakingly.

A solid citizen looking like the model junior executive, Doughlas, with three pens neatly clipped into his white shirt's pocket, is understandably incensed by an endless traffic jam caused by repair work on a Los Angeles thoroughfare. Hot and exasperated by all that honking, cursing, and a pesky fly, he leaves his car on the road. Jacketless, he grabs his Samsonite briefcase, and declares to the stalled souls around him, "I'm going home." But where is home for this man whose license plate reads D-FENS? Bill (his name is barely mentioned) is headed for his daughter's birthday party. But his ex-wife, Beth (Barbara Hershey), living with their daughter in bohemian Venice, has a restraining order forbidding Bill, who can get violent, to visit. And three weeks ago he was fired from his job. Still, as he moves through the city on foot now, he keeps calling Beth from sundry pay phones, announcing his impending, intensely unsolicited visit. Perhaps he thinks that offensiveness is the best D-FENS.

Unpleasant things happen to our voyager. He walks into a Korean market, and is about to be charged 85 cents for a Coke, which he deems outrageous. When the cocky store owner refuses to settle for 50 and tries to pull a baseball bat on him, Bill snatches the bat, smashes part of the store, takes the Coke, and punctiliously deposits a dollar in the cash register, from which he removes two quarters by way of change.

Further on, he discovers a hole in his sole (soul?), and sits down on a rock to stuff newspaper into his shoe. Two vicious-looking members of a Hispanic youth gang accost him, tell him he is encroaching on their territory, and demand his briefcase as tribute. He refuses; they pull a switchblade on him; he wrests it from them, roughs them up, and routs them. Promptly they join their girlfriends in a parked car, chase after Bill, shoot up an entire sidewalk full of people, but miraculously miss him. Their careering car collides with another; one attacker dies, the other lies stunned on the pavement. Bill picks up his dropped automatic rifle, shoots him in the ankle, stuffs the weapon in a gym bag he appropriates, and leaves with a sardonic comment. He is good at such Parthian shots.

The next showdown is at an eatery where, being three minutes late, Bill is refused breakfast: they are now serving lunch. Another outburst occurs when the Whamburger, radiant on a wall color transparency, is to the sorry thing served him like Hyperion to a satyr. Not unjustly enraged, he proceeds to terrify staff and clientele with his gun. Clearly--or muddily--Bill is both crazy as a loon and sober as a judge, because the screenwriter, Ebbe Roe Smith, and the director, Joel Schumacher, cannot quite make up their minds.

Meanwhile, the film has been cross-cutting to Prendergast (Robert Duvall), an honest cop, who is emptying his desk at the police station. Today he begins his early retirement, taken at the insistence of his spacy wife (Tuesday Weld, looking more like late Saturday), who has picked some wilderness retreat for them to resettle in. Though portrayed as a hopeless hysteric, she is loved and indulged by her husband. Their only daughter, who died long ago at age two, is still adored by them, and Prendergast removes her picture from his office desk as he prepares to leave for good.

I won't go into how and why Prendergast gets to go after Bill, while his wife keeps nagging on the phone, his captain keeps patronizing and insulting him, his fellow cops tell him to go home (like Bill, get it?) and leave the case to them, though they are on the wrong scent. Some parallel between Bill and Prendergast is plainly intended: both have wife trouble, a dead or withheld daughter, a lost or resigned job, and more besides. But the parallel is ultimately unresonant. Or else too pat, like the escalation in Bill's weaponry: baseball bat, knife, gun--all the way to a bazooka taken from a truly mad neo-Nazi army-surplus storekeeper, whom Bill shoots dead in self-defense. The gun-crazed lunatic (Frederic Forrest) had previously provoked and humiliated two homosexual customers, and deserves everything he gets.

This is kitchen-sink drama, though not in the usual sense of sweaty proletarians yelling at one another in the kitchen, but in that of having everything, including the kitchen sink, tossed into it. It is both politically incorrect (not very nice members of minorities) and correct (very nice Hispanic policewoman, very nice black man discriminated against by a white bank, very nice black child corrupted by white television), and veers wildly between drama and comedy, unable, as noted, to decide what to make of its hero. It's a crazy world, the film-makers seem to be saying, and don't look to us to decide who is saner, or guiltier, than the next fellow.