Falling Down
The heat, the smell of the idling cars with their ignitions left on, polluting the air, the screaming children in the bus alongside, the angry arguing businessman in the car next to his, stuck at an intersection being dug up with poorly managed traffic flow resulting in the pointless waiting, they may all be in their own cars but together they are in the same boat and it is sinking, no respite for any of them but William Foster the one who has had enough.
Walking away, his abandoned car causing more disruption, he wanders through the hostile and overheated suburbs of Los Angeles venting his thin temper on any who cross his path and fail to meet his expectations, moving from baseball bat to switchblade to a gym bag full of handguns, semi-automatics and even a rocket launcher, while on-the-cusp of retirement police detective Martin Prendergast tries to put together the disparate pieces of the jigsaw from second-hand reports and prevent a worse incident from manifesting.
Directed by Flatliners‘ Joel Schumacher, Falling Down was a tipping point before his descent into Batmadness, written by jobbing actor Ebbe Roe Smith and starring The Game’s Michael Douglas in what reads as a blueprint for a MAGA manifesto of grudges and exceptionalism, everyone wrong but Foster as he causes chaos and “sticks it to the man” by harassing workers in an infantile fast food joint, The Outfit’s Robert Duvall trying to keep up in a script which seems to prefigure the sentiment that “men will do anything rather than go to therapy.”
That he exists in an environment of poverty, inequality, sexism, homophobia, racism, violence and gang warfare does not justify or excuse what he has become or how he behaves, a product of the society which treats people as disposable but a willing and perhaps formerly enthusiastic one, a former soldier who until he was sacked built weapons for a defence contractor, a part of the system he now despises but who rather than seeking to change it conducts a vendetta against fellow victims of the same system rather than those who created and profit from it.
William “D-FENS” Foster a man who so terrorised his wife (The Entity’s Barbara Shelley wasted in a vapid role) to the point she obtained a divorce and a restraining order, his final scene realisation that he is the bad guy does not expunge the record of what he has done, his exit a cowardly refusal to face consequences and instead leave others to pick up the pieces of what he has wrought, the fact that the police are almost ubiquitously useless in their investigation, squabbling, presuming answers in race and blaming victims, does not defend him or them.
Presenting the white working-class divorced dad as the pinnacle of human achievement, always right while everyone else is lying to him, Arrow’s new restoration of Falling Down approved by cinematographer Andrzej Bartkowiak is supported by an archive commentary with Schumacher, Smith, Douglas, editor Paul Hirsch and actors Michael Paul Chan, Vondie Curtis-Hall and Frederic Forrest, an archive interview with Douglas, new interviews with Smith and composer James Newton Howard and a new feature visiting the Los Angeles locations.
Falling Down is available on 4K UHD and Blu-ray from Arrow now
