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'Falling Down'

In 1993, Joel Schumacher directed the paranoid urban tale of "D-FENS", a character whose primary concern is to make it back in time for his daughter’s birthday. However, along the way, this white, middle-class, shirt-and-tie-wearing everyman discovers that his journey is rapidly developing into a personal nightmare.

Michael Douglas is cast as the person losing his moral balance and being at war with the everyday world. At first, we see him sweating in traffic and losing patience so much so that he abandons his car on the freeway and declares “I’m going home.”

Next, he heads for the phone box to tell his ex-wife the news. A phone call is simple enough to task, one would think; however, D-FENS walks into the local deli looking for coins only to be told by the Korean shopkeeper that he must first make a purchase in order to be granted some change. Fair enough, but eighty-five cents for a soda doesn’t leave him enough money for the phone call. So he grabs a baseball bat from behind the counter and proceeds to bash every overpriced item in the place in a fit of rage. Then, he agrees a price of fifty cents for the soda, pays for it and walks off, with his anger subsided. Weird, eh?

As the story unravels, we are forced to make a distinction between an ordinary man and a deranged psychopath. Mid-way through things are taken to a new, hilarious level when D-FENS pulls a gun on the irritating manager of a fast food restaurant after he refuses serving him breakfast for being two minutes over the deadline.

Falling Down could quite easily be pigeon holed as a black comedy with its often cartoonishly over-the-top scenes of violence. However, it is the balance of intriguing social commentary contrasted with the scenes involving Prendergast (Robert Duvall), a nice guy desk cop striving to bring D-FENS in on his last day before retirement, that illuminate the movie high above the illusory mess of "dweeb-turned-bad" that it could so easily have been.

Douglas’ performance is as real as they come: His character is a combination of desperation and powerlessness that demands a response. Schumacher wants us to think that there is a little bit of D-FENS in all of us. What’s clever is the film's decision to turn an ordinary man into an avenging lily-white, attempting then to blame us for being deranged, psychopath-loving hypocrites when we start to root for the character towards the end.

Falling Down is a gripping portrayal of the mental instability that can lurk behind every average human being within the seedy environment of their day to day life. It warns us that we should never mess with a white shirt and tie, no matter how normal they may first seem.

(C) Andy Carrington, 2008.

Critique: Film> Reviews.

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