Falling Down
Directed by Joel Schumacher
Written by Ebbe Roe Smith
Starring Michael Douglas, Robert Duvall, Barbara Hershey
Reviewed by Karen Fredericks
Somehow a story on the cover of Newsweek, entitled "White male paranoia: Are they the newest victims or just bad sports?", has managed to convince a majority of film critics, and in turn their readers, that Falling Down is a violently racist, misogynist film. It is not.
Newsweek, followed by a host of other newspapers and magazines, dubbed the production yet another "backlash" film — a response to immigration and affirmative action programs and the increasing economic independence of women. This has fooled a large number of "liberal" and otherwise "politically correct" commentators into delivering a big "tsk tsk" for the central character, D-Fens (played by Michael Douglas), on the basis that the motivation for his violence is his personal, irrational, inexcusable and unnecessary racism and misogyny. It is not.
D-Fens (known by the personalised number plate on his car) is a middle-aged white who has been out of work for a month, retrenched from his job at a Defence Department munitions plant, but has not told his mother, with whom he has been living since his separation from his wife and child.
He leaves home each day with nothing in his briefcase but a sandwich wrapped in gladwrap and a piece of fruit. He wears a clean, white, short-sleeved business shirt with a row of pens in the pocket, and a striped tie. Despite the loss of his family and his job, he maintains his scrupulously neat appearance and his rigid daily routine, but there is nothing behind it any more.
Falling Down is an account of the day D-Fens snaps. A series of events unleashes a violent anger which builds to a point where, in his words, "it is further to go back than it is to continue to the end" — the point of no return.
Caught in a gridlock on an LA freeway on the hottest day of the year, D-Fens is seized with the desire to visit his young daughter on her birthday. He abandons his car.
In the well-publicised "racist" scene, he attempts to obtain change for a phone call to his wife from a Korean shopkeeper who refuses to oblige unless he buys something. When the shopkeeper tells him that a can of Coke costs 85, D-Fens first observes that this will not leave him with sufficient change, from his $1 note, for the phone call, and then, irrelevantly, abuses the shopkeeper for his thick Korean accent.
This is the point at which his anger overflows. Apoplectic at the prices (and at his own abject poverty — he is unemployed) he dredges up some dim mass-media memory and asks, "Do you know how much money my country gives to your country every year?". The cowering ow much?". D-Fens replies, "I don't know, but I know it's a helluva lot!"
D-Fens never manages to identify the root of his anger. He is just angry, and random violence is the only thing that springs to mind. Unlike the neo-Nazi he meets in his travels (and whom he derides as "sick"), he does not consciously blame minorities and women. He is angry at the ostentatious wealth of a plastic surgeon, but he does not blame the rich. Like the black child who in one scene shows him how to operate a grenade launcher (which he learned from watching TV), D-Fens is more familiar with violence than he is with politics.
Considering the "racist" tag the film has been wearing, it is ironic that the character with whom D-Fens has most in common is a black man. In his only scene the man, who is of similar age to D-Fens, and dressed in a similarly neat, conservative style, is staging a lone protest outside a savings and loans office, which has denied him a loan. He carries a sign which reads "not economically viable".
As the cops carry the protester away in a police car, he leans out the window and calls to D-Fens, "Don't forget me". Later D-Fens recalls the protester's words and makes the link with his own situation: "I am not economically viable", he tells a family to whom he is trying to explain his actions.
Margaret Pomeranz, on SBS's Movie show, jumped on the Newsweek bandwagon and called Falling Down "dangerous". She is concerned that audiences will not realise that there is "something wrong" with D-Fens and will identify with him too closely. She believes the fact that his wife (played by Barbara Hershey) has obtained a restraining order against him indicates he is "not normal", but feels that this "clue" to his true nature as a bad guy is too subtle for most audiences.
But Pomeranz has missed the point: D-Fens is not supposed to be your regular pathological demon-monster bad guy. The point is not what is "wrong" with him. There is something more pervasively "wrong" with modern life.
Unlike the clutch of "backlash" movies which characterised Hollywood in the late '80s, Falling Down does not eroticise violence and misogyny, nor mystify "evil". Recognisably human dialogue and gritty production design put it more in the camp of the Hollywood of the '70s, where working class interiors and cityscape exteriors were much closer to their counterparts in the real world than the lavishly appointed film sets of the big budget '80s.
The film's account of the situation of a woman living in fear of domestic violence is chillingly real and, unlike the "movie of the week" formulations, does not rely on the depiction of the perpetrator as mysteriously deranged. There is no mystery about D-Fens' derangement.
There are no political answers in Falling Down, just some extremely important, and timely, questions. D-Fens tells the cop (played by Robert Duvall) who has been pursuing him on his rampage e he tried to do all the right things, he has done what he was told, but he has been "lied to". The cop acknowledges that "they lie to everybody", but not everybody goes on a violent rampage. Maybe not — but the numbers sure seem to be on the increase.