Falling Down

1993 dramedy

Rating: 15/20

Plot: A guy with anger issues has an interesting day as he tries to make it to his daughter's birthday party.

When I saw this in '93, I loved it. I'm pretty sure I thought it was pretty deep. Seeing it in 2019 as a middle-aged liberal, it's a much different experience. I remembered the opening with the traffic jam, the scene with the gang members, and the scene in the military surplus store for some reason. And of course, I remembered the ending, one that I remember thinking was nearly as moving and shocking as the ending of Vertigo, my personal favorite at the time.

I didn't remember how awesomely heavy-handed this thing is. Hell hath no fury like an angry white man scorned. It's never really clear whether we're supposed to identify with this Michael Douglas character because his viewpoints are wildly inconsistent. There are times when he's a little like Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm character, griping about the ills of a world he's having trouble fitting into, maybe even legitimately raising issues about society in the early-90s. Most of the time, he's just a very angry white man, the kind of guy you figure would even wear a MAGA hat around. It's really hard to see what Joel Schumacher is trying to do with this character or with Duvall's more cartoonish version of Tommy Lee Jones' cop in No Country for Old Men.

The whole thing's really thematically muddy, but that makes it a fascinating document from a very muddy decade. This is a very 90's film. Douglas's character is searching for a home. He's lost a literal home and family, and it's clear that his character doesn't recognize the America he's walking through in his efforts to get back to his literal home. "Everybody has their own ideas about what paradise is." The corrupted imagery of urban Americana in this movie is almost a failed Garden of Eden, America some sort of failed attempt at a kind of paradise.

Part of that failed attempt has to do with America as this utopian melting pot. The most obvious statement is the African American man protesting that he's been considered "not economically viable" and winding up arrested, but there are other people who aren't angry white men who Douglas's character runs into or interacts with. The gang members he encounters are Hispanic. The guy who tries to overcharge him for a Coke is Korean. There's a Japanese cop. There's a Middle Eastern guy who sells him a unicorn snow globe. What isn't represented much at all here along his journey through hellish Los Angeles is women. There's a female cop, and his ex-wife and daughter surely factor into the story, but there aren't many female characters he interacts with while trying to find a home.

Lots of American iconography litters the screen. It starts right away with the great opening extended shot showing Douglas in that traffic jam, a scene that plays a lot like a horror film. Early on, you see Garfield, a Big Boy advertisement, American flags, and religious and pessimistic bumper stickers. Later, there's the Coca Cola, a broken jar of American flags, a mural with Native Americans, greedy banks, military surplus stores, homophobia, racism, moon mission failures, pollution, anti-Communist rants, and people golfing in goofy hats. It's a nauseating glimpse at America Douglas journeys through, and there's seemingly no place for him anymore as he fulminates giving money to Korea (though he's unsure about that whole thing), his rights as a consumer, fast food menu accuracy, freedom of speech and the right to disagree, and anything else that seems to bug him on this stressful morning of his. Meanwhile, he keeps upgrading his weapons. He starts with a wildly-swung briefcase before inheriting a bat, trading that in for a knife, and eventually getting his hands on a bag of guns.

What's it all mean? Again, I'm not so sure.

Falling Down anticipates a decade that just kept getting angrier and more angst-ridden, and though it's unclear to me what its intentions might be, it remains a really fascinating document of troubled times in a troubled place and one lost soul trying to navigate it all.