Welcome to The Best Movie You NEVER Saw, a column dedicated to examining films that have flown under the radar or gained traction throughout the years, earning them a place as a cult classic or underrated gem that was either before it’s time and/or has aged like a fine wine.
This week we’ll be looking at FALLING DOWN!
THE PLAYERS: Starring: Michael Douglas, Robert Duvall, Barbara Hershey. Directed by Joel Schumacher.
I would say, take a look — the guy is sick. He has real issues. He’s not really [taking] a heroic stand. Although I think two things were going on in the movie — one is how messed up he was, and the other part of it was that he was doing things that made people feel good. There were things that people wanted to do themselves but couldn’t do it, because of the risk and putting themselves out there in that dangerous place. – Ebbe Roe Smith – The Wrap
THE HISTORY: Back in the early nineties, Michael Douglas was riding high off the unexpected, massive success of BASIC INSTINCT. Tempted to take a break from acting, having made that and SHINING THROUGH back-to-back, Douglas was lured into making FALLING DOWN by his friend Joel Schumacher. A huge change of pace for both of them, in particular Schumacher, who was then known mostly for sexy commercial fare like ST. ELMO’S FIRE, THE LOST BOYS and FLATLINERS, FALLING DOWN was a risky bet for Warner Bros. Douglas was so keen to make the film after reading Ebbe Roe Smith’s script that he lowered his substantial fee for the time to get the film made.
The result was relatively acclaimed, and it did respectably well at the box office ($40.9 million against a $25 million budget) although shockingly, Douglas and the film were totally shut out of the awards race at the end of the year. Politically, it became something of a hot potato, with some missing the message of the movie and accusing it of being racist or facist, and to this date it’s still a movie that makes people uncomfortable.
He played it brilliantly. I think it’s his best piece of work to date… Michael’s character is not the ‘hero’ or ‘newest urban icon’. He is the villain and the victim. – Kirk Douglas – L.A Times editorial
WHY IT’S GREAT: FALLING DOWN is most definitely a movie that takes on an interesting new dimension when watched nowadays, twenty-six years after its release. Having been shot in the midst of much turmoil in L.A (the shooting was interrupted by the Rodney King riots) it shone a light on a throughly unpleasant character – the angry, toxic, disenfranchised (he thinks) white male. It’s telling that some watch this movie thinking Douglas is a kind of vigilante icon in the mold of Charles Bronson in DEATH WISH, but that’s not the case at all. He’s a lunatic and while the film cleverly attempts to get us to sympathize with him at times or even cheer him on, that’s the point. Schumacher makes us complicit, and it’s a dazzling directorial outing for a filmmaker often mocked for his camp style.
One of the most telling moments occurs at the midway point, where Douglas’s Bill Foster comes face to face with Frederic Forrest’s Nazi military surplus store owner. You can tell by the look on Douglas’s face throughout that he despises the man, grimacing at his homophobic comments towards a gay couple. Yet, he’s not really that different from this Nazi psycho at all, he only thinks he is. It’s interesting that Forrest becomes the first person he actually kills, sending him past the point of no return and kicking up his violent trek home to his ex-wife (Barbara Hershey) and child a few notches. It’s not hard to agree with Robert Duvall’s sympathetic cop character, who knows damn well this guy is going to wind up killing his wife and daughter. In fact, Foster, or D-Fens’s odyssey has uncomfortable parallels to many cases that cropped up in the headlines years later.
It’s also hard to separate this film from the current political climate, something no one involved with this could have ever predicted. There’s something very familiar about D-Fens’s gripes with society if you read articles put out by the alt-right, the only difference being that when this came out he was an outlier. In the years since, D-Fens has (terrifyingly) gone mainstream.
Politics and weightier themes aside, FALLING DOWN is a terrifically entertaining movie, and I tend to agree with Kirk Douglas when he said it’s Michael’s best performance ever. Even Gordon Gekko is kinda cool in that familiar Michael Douglas-kind of way, but he utterly vanishes into D-Fens and the fact that he wasn’t even nominated for an Oscar is criminal. As the kindly cop chasing him, Duvall is remarkably empathetic, and they give him enough material to chew on (such as his disturbed wife – played by Tuesday Weld– waiting for him to come home), even if the cop on the verge of retirement sent into danger is a bit of a cliche.
BEST SCENE: My first job ever was working at McDonalds, and let me tell you – people got PISSED when they arrived a few minutes late for breakfast. People loved their egg McMuffins, and when they couldn’t get them meltdowns often were the result. As crazy as D-Fens is, people cheered during this scene back in ’93.
SEE IT: FALLING DOWN is available of iTunes, Google Play, Blu-ray, and is streaming on STARZ in Canada.
PARTING SHOT: It’s probably a toss-up between this and THE LOST BOYS as far as my favourite Joel Schumacher films go, and for anyone who dismisses him based on his BATMAN movies, give this a watch. It’s a damn good film and an utterly fascinating one to re-examine through a contemporary lens.