Director: Joel Schumacher
Writer: Ebbe Roe Smith
Photography: Andrzej Bartkowiak
Music: James Newton Howard
Editor: Paul Hirsch
Cast: Michael Douglas, Robert Duvall, Barbara Hershey, Rachel Ticotin, Tuesday Weld, Frederic Forrest, Lois Smith, Raymond J. Barry
It was hard for me to get a bead on this movie when it was new. I didn't understand who it was speaking for or what it wanted to tell us. Now, in what we regard hopefully as our tentative springtime in America post-Trump era ("Alexa, what's a quote for optimism?"), a lot of things about it make more sense, such as all the "replacement theory" ideas embedded in the dialogue that I never recognized previously. Such a mix of evocative elements: Michael Douglas remains the original and possibly greatest yuppie boomer scum of all time (Wall Street, Fatal Attraction, plus I think The Game is a criminally overlooked exercise in this vein). Douglas has said he considers his performance in Falling Down to be his best, and his dad agreed too. Financing for Falling Down came from abroad as well as Hollywood—I don't know what that means, except it seems slightly early for globalism. Filming had to be stopped in spring 1992 when riots erupted in Los Angeles around the verdict in the first trial for police charged with assaulting Rodney King. Last but not least, director Joel Schumacher remains mostly a cipher for me, generally better early, as with The Lost Boys and Flatliners. But I like his taste for the sensational even if it often seems addled.
So here we are: Michael Douglas's Bill Foster wears a short-sleeved white shirt with a striped tie and clip. He carries a snappy little square attache case. His glasses are horn-rimmed. His haircut is crewcut. He works as an engineer in the defense industry in Southern California—his vanity license plate says "D-FENS." The movie starts on a bad traffic jam, a typical big city freeway crawl (see also the opening of Office Space), from which Foster finally walks away in frustration, wandering off into the "Los Angeles gangland" in search of change for a payphone. That's when all the trouble starts. Foster tells himself and others he is going home, meaning to the house where he used to live with his ex-wife and family. It's his daughter's birthday. Later we find out he has been living with his mother and lost his job a month earlier.
It was hard for me to get a bead on this movie when it was new. I didn't understand who it was speaking for or what it wanted to tell us. Now, in what we regard hopefully as our tentative springtime in America post-Trump era ("Alexa, what's a quote for optimism?"), a lot of things about it make more sense, such as all the "replacement theory" ideas embedded in the dialogue that I never recognized previously. Such a mix of evocative elements: Michael Douglas remains the original and possibly greatest yuppie boomer scum of all time (Wall Street, Fatal Attraction, plus I think The Game is a criminally overlooked exercise in this vein). Douglas has said he considers his performance in Falling Down to be his best, and his dad agreed too. Financing for Falling Down came from abroad as well as Hollywood—I don't know what that means, except it seems slightly early for globalism. Filming had to be stopped in spring 1992 when riots erupted in Los Angeles around the verdict in the first trial for police charged with assaulting Rodney King. Last but not least, director Joel Schumacher remains mostly a cipher for me, generally better early, as with The Lost Boys and Flatliners. But I like his taste for the sensational even if it often seems addled.
So here we are: Michael Douglas's Bill Foster wears a short-sleeved white shirt with a striped tie and clip. He carries a snappy little square attache case. His glasses are horn-rimmed. His haircut is crewcut. He works as an engineer in the defense industry in Southern California—his vanity license plate says "D-FENS." The movie starts on a bad traffic jam, a typical big city freeway crawl (see also the opening of Office Space), from which Foster finally walks away in frustration, wandering off into the "Los Angeles gangland" in search of change for a payphone. That's when all the trouble starts. Foster tells himself and others he is going home, meaning to the house where he used to live with his ex-wife and family. It's his daughter's birthday. Later we find out he has been living with his mother and lost his job a month earlier.
I see now the main reason this movie was hard to read is because it doesn't seem to know itself where it stands on Bill Foster. He's kind of a hero in the early going. Abandons his car and walks away from a bad traffic jam—who hasn't wanted to do that? Then he goes into a convenience store for change and can't get it without buying something. When he picks out a soft drink it costs too much to give him the change from a dollar he needs. Later, he gets hassled when he tries to sit in a park and collect himself. He snaps over and over. At first we may be inclined to be sympathetic, certainly to his frustrations if not his violence (but sometimes to his violence too, although first, for example, before I blew up, if I even would blow up, I would have asked if I could have change for a second dollar while buying the product placement).
It doesn't take long for the heavy ordnance to arrive along with a lot of cliches about Los Angeles and Black gangs and drive-by shootings and such. Now Foster is walking around with a gym bag full of lethal weapons, dodging the police and encountering a strange Nazi (Frederic Forrest) who runs a military surplus store. The sequence has such striking parallels with the white supremacist pawnshop scenes in Pulp Fiction it seems likely Quentin Tarantino was fully aware of it and may even have used it as a kind of template or jumping-off point.
Falling Down also has an ongoing B story involving the police and actually some pretty good performances—Robert Duvall and Tuesday Weld, so no surprises there. But the main show is all Bill Foster and his long day's journey into night and realizing "I'm the bad guy?" The question mark and Michael Douglas's bewildered face as he realizes the truth make it iconic, the turning point of the whole film, nearly on the level with and a kind of nice counterpoint to his "Greed is good" mot in Wall Street.
In the end it's heartening that the movie seems to realize Bill Foster is the bad guy, even if Foster never really figures it out himself. It's disheartening that the movie starts by wanting to give the white guy every possible benefit of the doubt, which is basically the ongoing story of this country and this historical moment at which we have arrived. Foster expresses himself confusingly by using the words of a Black man he saw protesting outside a bank: "I'm obsolete. I'm not economically viable." It's confusing and a little deceitful because it's the white man's "replacement" problem exactly and this movie is about white man problems.
In its despair Falling Down contains a lot of recognizable germs for what we know and see today: the opioid crisis, the soaring suicide rates, and all the dangerous irrational Trumpy rage that we indulge because we live in a social system dominated by abuse. The rage still makes us flinch. Even elements of the January 6 insurrection itself are right out there in this picture. And it's not really the roots of it, but more the branches as they were growing 25 years ago, as they have been growing like kudzu for centuries. These problems of white grievance, resentment, and entitlement—they've been around a long time.
It doesn't take long for the heavy ordnance to arrive along with a lot of cliches about Los Angeles and Black gangs and drive-by shootings and such. Now Foster is walking around with a gym bag full of lethal weapons, dodging the police and encountering a strange Nazi (Frederic Forrest) who runs a military surplus store. The sequence has such striking parallels with the white supremacist pawnshop scenes in Pulp Fiction it seems likely Quentin Tarantino was fully aware of it and may even have used it as a kind of template or jumping-off point.
Falling Down also has an ongoing B story involving the police and actually some pretty good performances—Robert Duvall and Tuesday Weld, so no surprises there. But the main show is all Bill Foster and his long day's journey into night and realizing "I'm the bad guy?" The question mark and Michael Douglas's bewildered face as he realizes the truth make it iconic, the turning point of the whole film, nearly on the level with and a kind of nice counterpoint to his "Greed is good" mot in Wall Street.
In the end it's heartening that the movie seems to realize Bill Foster is the bad guy, even if Foster never really figures it out himself. It's disheartening that the movie starts by wanting to give the white guy every possible benefit of the doubt, which is basically the ongoing story of this country and this historical moment at which we have arrived. Foster expresses himself confusingly by using the words of a Black man he saw protesting outside a bank: "I'm obsolete. I'm not economically viable." It's confusing and a little deceitful because it's the white man's "replacement" problem exactly and this movie is about white man problems.
In its despair Falling Down contains a lot of recognizable germs for what we know and see today: the opioid crisis, the soaring suicide rates, and all the dangerous irrational Trumpy rage that we indulge because we live in a social system dominated by abuse. The rage still makes us flinch. Even elements of the January 6 insurrection itself are right out there in this picture. And it's not really the roots of it, but more the branches as they were growing 25 years ago, as they have been growing like kudzu for centuries. These problems of white grievance, resentment, and entitlement—they've been around a long time.
I'd be surprised if Bill wasn't some inspiration to the Walter White character in Breaking Bad as well. And would be curious to see this again in the harsh light of the metastasizing dumpster fire that is Trump's GQP.
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