FALLING DOWN

DISCOVERY:
Falling Down is not a nice movie. I disliked all the characters, yet I found myself identifying with the dread antihero, Bill Foster, played by Michael Douglas. It is a surprisingly excellent movie for two reasons. One, director Joel Schumacher has a string of mediocre films to his credit. Two, this is Falling Down's star, Michael Douglas' first smashing performance. He has either played second violin or starred in schlock films like Romancing the Stone, for decades. Too bad the film was panned by nearsighted film critics.

ANALYSIS:
Mr.Foster makes the transition from defense worker—slave of the world aggressor, the good ol' US of A, to street thug. The US government poured tax dollars into defense until the infrastructure of the country is in a state of collapse. The city is a war zone regardless of what neighborhood you are in. The wily Chicano brothers would cut your guts out as easily as the plaid, polyester-clad golfer would slice one your way. 

Bill loses his job as a technician. The company refuses to retrain him. He is disposable, just like everything else in this consumer culture we live in. His wife divorces him and gets custody rights. She goes one further in securing restraining orders against him. He is forced to move in with his aging, widowed mother, a veritable neurotic living in denial. He is unable to find another job. He has no friends. His father's been dead for some time. He has no siblings. This man is alone, and abandoned. He is a ship foundering off-shore and about to wreck.  
Misfortune rolls into our hero's way, as it does to the heroes of Trains, Planes and Automobiles, The Out-of-Towners (1970), and, Drop Dead Fred. But the difference here is Bill has reached the end of his line. He's not white collar with money to fall back on. He has no wife, no family, no friends. So the boulders rolled into the path of the straight man for comic effect in comedies, serve as the ammunition for this tragedy.

Does our antihero grow? Bill realizes that life around him is far worse than he knew. If the bad breaks in his life are not enough, he awakens to the reality that he lives in a societal cesspool. The members of which are only to willing to help him drown. These are people Bill worked so hard to defend against the ravishes of invading foreigners, as a part of our nation's military industrial complex. 

Our hero, Sergeant Pendergast, on the other hand, stands-up to his whining  officer, discovers what his superior really thinks of him, and, in cracking the case, saves the day and martyrs himself by deciding to keep his job and continue combating bad guys.  

J.D. Salinger said, "It is better to live humbly for a cause than fight valiantly for one." Pendergast is the embodiment of the humble, the sage, the seer. His plan is to move east. Pendergast has the big picture. There is, in actuality, a rather large map of the city on the police station wall. Bill, on the other hand, is down in the trenches, fighting valiantly in the concrete jungle. He has lost his sight (the lens in one of his glasses is broken), his sense of humor, his sense of proportion. He walks in a circle through the city, trying to get "Home". Pendergast sees all from the high command. He even climbs a hill for a better view.  
Communication is no better at the top, than the bottom of the heap. Pendergast can't get fellow officers to listen to him. Bill is not respected either. Both are listeners, attuned to their fellow man. Where lies the difference? 
Pendergast is a high ranking officer. Foster, the gun assembler, who is like the interchangeable parts themselves,  is a mere cog; A private citizen. If the shoe were on the other foot, would Pendergast end up as Foster did?

Michael Douglas as Bill Foster

Country: USA
Language: English

CREDITS:
              112.00 min. 1993

Directed by: Joel Schumacher 
Written by:  Ebbe Roe Smith 

Credits complements of IMDb

OPENING SCENE:
A middle aged man sits in bumper-to-bumper traffic in the sweltering summer heat of smoggy Los Angeles. Traffic is at a complete standstill. His car does not have working air conditioning. The window crank is broken. A fly buzzes around his face. Idiots honk their horns. Next to him is a busload of screaming brats, undisciplined, with no respect for others—a metaphor for the average adult of today. In front of him, a bright yellow-orange stuffed cat with pointy teeth (Garfield, a glaring symbol of arrogance and self-centeredness) is suction-cupped to a rear windshield. Why does an adult driver display a mean toy? A sign of our time.

PLOT:
Michael Douglas plays a guy who is on the edge. All he wants is to go home. The beauty of this film lies in the gray zone, the shadow line, the twilight of sanity. It  raises the question, can someone know they have gone insane and still behave insane? Is our hero deranged, or is he merely enraged? 

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