 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
Falling Down
|
 |
|
It is a common experience for many viewers that the trailer for a film turns out to be better – or at least more vivid – than the film itself. I had this experience with Joel Schumacher’s briefly controversial Falling Down. Promising a film that would deliver a contemporary parable about a troubled urban reality, the trailer showed tantalising glimpses of an Everyman, Foster (Michael Douglas), who one day snaps in the middle of a traffic jam, becoming a raging street vigilante – not just flaming mad, but also wild, crazy and liberated: a little, mutatis mutandis, in the vein of Michel Piccoli as Themroc (1973). The fact that the anti-hero of Falling Down seemed (to judge from the preview) more intent on machine gunning wonky phone booths, smashing up pricey stores or punching out random highway loudmouths than on reforming society only served to make the idea of the movie all the more intriguing. Let me explain my reaction. In the course of writing an essay on displays of aggression (aggro, as we Australians say) in cinema and TV for my first book, Phantasms (1994), I surveyed what I came to consider a defining and essential trait of B cinema: its wish-fulfilment function in relation to anarchistic, ‘smash everything’, asocial impulses and fantasies. Such asocial drives are, quite simply, an integral, constitutive part of culture (especially popular culture) in general; we ignore or downplay them at our peril. So, the prospect of Schumacher [1939-2020] – a sub-auteur who himself began by skirting the lighter side of B movie fantasies in such delightfully populist fare as Car Wash (1976), Amateur Night at the Dixie Bar and Grill (1979) and D.C. Cab (1983), and intermittently revived them in projects like the rousing The Lost Boys (1987) – taking the aggro complex to A movie heights of mainstream visibility was truly irresistible. From this angle, the trailer prompted me to imagine an Oscar-winning, devil-may-care, big-budget version of Graham Baker’s remarkable Impulse (1984) – in which, according to an enigmatic, speculative, J.G. Ballardian premise, the population at large suddenly starts acting on every imaginable asocial drive, grand or petty. Falling Down is finally, alas, not an all-out asocial fantasy. It is a message film (in an old Hollywood tradition) with a social conscience, trying to dig up the psychological truth behind all-too-common, real-life stories of senseless violence. As Schumacher gets more solemn and preachy, his film becomes more questionable – and its initial, hell-raising premise becomes far more circumspect. The script by Ebbe Roe Smith (better known as an actor, his only other such credits are co-writing a short for Peter Weller, and contributing to the lame comedy Car 54, Where Are You? [1994]) is too careful to surround Foster’s extreme behaviour with an extenuating, sociological explanation (he’s retrenched) and a heavy dose of pathos (he’s barred from seeing his child – typical male-melodrama stuff). Significantly, what would be, in a merrily amoral B movie, the rowdiest set-piece of the story – a scene in which an old, golf-putting yuppie has a stroke on the green, and Foster just walks away, triumphantly indifferent – is here handled evasively, as if Schumacher had suddenly become very nervous about wholeheartedly indulging a sick fantasy of class revenge. Finally, the film moves around to blaming the ills of Modern Man not only on stress and unemployment but, also and especially, on Modern Woman – here personified, in Foster’s immediate vicinity, by Barbara Hershey as Beth. I advise anyone suspecting me of political-ideological correctitude on this point to take a good, hard look at the bizarre sub-plot involving Robert Duvall as Prendergast, a heroic cop, and poor Tuesday Weld as Amanda, his whining, neurotic wife. For all its contentious points, however, Falling Down is undeniably a provocative and engaging case – a high-profile A movie commendably tackling hot topics and emotions usually left to the cinema’s lowly exploitation realms. If only it had gone further … MORE Schumacher: Batman & Robin, Batman Forever, Phone Booth, The Phantom of the Opera © Adrian Martin November 1993 |
