Editor’s Note: The summer heat can make a lot of feel cranky, irritable, and even a bit angry at the rest of the world. With that in mind, Freeline Media critic Mike Fried looks back at a film from the 1990s that took a sharp look at summertime rage. Read on!
By MIKE FRIED
FALLING DOWN
5/5
I’ll start off by saying that this is Michael Douglas’ best film performance — and he has said that this is his favorite performance of all the movies he has been in. Even his dad, the great Kirk, said it was his son’s best performance.
No matter how many times I watch this film, it still hits.
When the movie opens up, our protagonist D-Fens is sitting in traffic. There’s no soundtrack, only what he sees: blinking lights, a smiling Garfield doll stuck to the window of the car in front of him, a bus full of kids, two assholes on a cell phone. He’s stuck, there’s no A/C in his car, there’s a fly bugging the shit out of him and he can’t take it. He just gets out of his car and walks away. “Where are you going, buddy?” the guy behind him asks. “I’m going home.”
He tries to call his ex-wife but he cannot speak. He needs change for the phone. He walks into a convenience store to get some spare change and when the proprietor says a can of soda is 85 cents, he goes berserk. He uses a baseball bat to ruin the goods in the store as he is “rolling back prices.”
What was the line in Apocalypse Now? The General says “Every man has got a breaking point. You have and I have them. Walter Kurtz has reached his. And, very obviously, he has gone insane.”
The same applies to D-Fens and the film documents, over the course of a day, the decline of Bill Foster, our anti-hero. (D-Fens is his license plate).
This film is a product of the 90s and, like I said, it contains what is Michael Douglas’s finest role. (The hell with Gordon Gecko!). But it’s a movie that is so relevant today. The film is a microcosm of what our society has become: people fed up, taking their rage out on others. Just watch the opening of the similarly themed recent movie, Unhinged (which starts out with video clips of road rage incidents) and you can see society still boiling over.
Thankfully, today, most people take their anger out on social media, although there are very notable exceptions. But it wasn’t like that 33 years ago — so it was shocking, and maybe even a little bit humorous back then — but watching it now it is down right scary.
This film belongs to Douglas — like I said, I think this is his finest role. His rage is certainly racially motivated but there’s more. He’s a man who feels he’s been screwed over time and again, and when his rage boils over, watch out! He starts off by trashing a Korean grocery store for overcharging prices (which they didn’t) and then attacks two gangbangers who threaten him (which they did). His crew cut and his 1960s-style glasses, along with his white shirt sleeve shirt and black slacks, are a total contradiction not only for D-Fens in 1993 but for Michael Douglas’ pretty boy image he had carefully cultivated earlier in his career.
In fact, he really looked like his dad Kirk in Spartacus – if Spartacus wore glasses. He exudes a man at the Boiling Point — and who hasn’t felt that way at one point or another? He’s a man with a temper and before today his temper was reserved for his ex-wife and daughter. But today, he settles all scores real or imagined. By his own admission, he is past the point of no return. Consider if you will, what if the Terminator wore a shirt and a tie? He’d become this guy. D-Fens is not taking any shit from anyone. The scene in the Whammyburger is the stuff of Oscars and Douglas was criminally not even nominated. When he asks “I’m the bad guy?” you feel his pain. And yet he is a conundrum — when he goes to an Army Surplus Store for new clothes, he is disgusted by the racist, sexist, homophobic, neo-Nazi owner when he harasses a gay couple. His performance is hypnotic.
On his trail is a cop named Prendergast who (and this is one of the minor failings of the script) is retiring today and moving to Lake Havasu. The coincidence is too much to swallow. And Prendergast’s screechy, emotionally upset wife is a distraction to the story. But if Tuesday Weld is weak as Prendergast’s wife, Robert Duvall knocks it out of the park as Prendergast. Because it’s his last day, he is dismissed by all the other cops — as if he has “last day-itis”; he’s a guy who should be taking it easy and cleaning the sand out of his desk that was placed there as a practical joke. Duvall plays Prendergast as a guy who doesn’t want to retire but who is doing it for his wife. But he’s the only guy who is connecting the dots to all the random acts of violence going on in the city. Duvall nails the role with his usual aplomb. He laughs at what appears to be coincidences — his trademark Duvall chuckle is on full display — but he knows that something is going on and rather than dismissing his gut like his fellow cops, he takes action.
Despite the improbabilities mentioned above, the script by Ebbe Roe Smith really is scary. It tapped into an underlying current of America fostered by former Georgia Congressman and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and his crew, a current that has now bubbled to the surface, especially on January 6th.
And director Joel Schumacher peaked with this film (apologies to fans of The Lost Boys ). He ties the film together beautifully. He brought out the best not only in Douglas but also in Frederic Forrest (as the neo-Nazi survivalist) and Rachel Ticotin as Prendergast’s former partner and Lois Smith as D-Fens’ mother as well as all of the smaller players. There’s not a false note (except Weld). Raymond J. Barry is especially great as the Captain who asks Prendergast to reconsider his retirement and when he doesn’t, he tells Prendergast he’s glad because he never liked him since he’s a cop who has never cursed one time in 30 years, which leads to a great gag at the end of the movie.
There’s a great scene where D-Fens is carrying around his briefcase and a gym bag full of guns. He is accosted by a homeless guy who gives him shit for carrying two bags. He gives away the briefcase and keeps the gym bag, signaling his surrender to his baser instincts. It is a masterstroke of a scene, because like he said in the beginning of the film, “I’m going home.” And we know what his intentions are, especially after he tells his ex-wife that “In some South American countries, it’s still legal to kill your wife if she insults you?”
Schumacher’s use of shadows and foreboding music as well as humor really enhance the tensions in this film. There’s a great scene when Douglas is running on the Venice pier and Schumacher uses the zoom in pull back dolly zoom but with a moving camera. It’s a very disorienting shot in a very disorienting film. And the editing in the very first scene is top-notch and really conveys the sense that Foster’s world is closing in on him and that he is about to snap.
Again, in 1993 this was a shocking film. Today, it’s downright scary. As Roger Ebert said, the film “is actually about a great sadness that turns into madness.”
WATCH IT !
5/5
Fun Fact: In a Simpsons episode entitled Homer’s Enemy (1997) the animators said they designed the character of Frank Grimes to look like Michael Douglas’s character in this film. The idea is both men were fed up and impatient with society.
Michael Fried has no formal training in movies, except having watched over 26,000+ movies — if not more — in his 60-plus years on this planet, starting with Goldfinger as his first cinema experience. He knows what he likes and he knows what he doesn’t like, and it’s quite often different from the conventional wisdom. He knows that the best franchise is Godzilla and he loves action movies and comedies. He has not been nominated for any awards except some boring insurance awards which has no applicability to movies (with the possible exceptions of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and John Cassavettes’ Big Trouble). He is part of a team that won the 1980 SUNY Albany Trivia content by correctly guessing the question, “Who played the president of Klopstockia in Million Dollar Legs?” So he has that going for him, which is nice.
Contact Mike at moviemike3@gmail.com.
