Our detective, Prendergast, is getting through the contempt of his fellow peace officers ok but starts noticing a pattern to a series of petty crime reports, the pattern on the city map starts looking like someone making their way through the bad neighbourhoods. When D started walking and the angry guy in the car behind him asked where he was going, he just said, "I'm going home". We've seen him call a few times (the first included his first tantrum like demonstration). A woman answers but he can't talk. She knows who it is.
This film was trailered in a strange manner, starting like the kind of social comedy that was the benchmark at the time, all violence and testing, but soon starts looking more serious. The opening in the traffic jam could have been in an Ivan Reitman or Harold Ramis movie with the lens creeping over the bonnet and getting into the car in silence. It already looks like stress and when the audio turns up you can smell it, too. By the time D gets out of his car and says he's going home you're ready for some fun, cartoony overreactions.
But when the violence does start it's interracial with the middle class white guy in triumph. The Korean shop keeper gets a serve for reading out prices that anger the self-styled ordinary American guy who thinks they should still be the same as when he was younger. We get a mini lecture about how much support America gives to Korea .. to a Korean who is no longer anywhere near Korea. Followed by a pair of Latinx gangers he slams them with his briefcase and then the sawn off baseball bat he stole from the shop keeper.
For balance he also threatens the whitebread staff at the fast food place with annihilation and then faces off against an uber bigot neo Nazi in a guns 'n' helmets shop. By the time he ignites a coronary in the ancient privileged golfer we get the idea that his fury at world's unfairness is colourblind and even. But that really isn't where it started and any writer and film director who knew their audiences would know to start with those triggers. Getting on to corporate stiffness and class entitlement can come later, let's get the easy stuff going first.
D's nemesis is a man so Zen that not only does he deal with the traffic jam as though he's watching a river ripple from the shade of a tree, he sails through the hostility of his colleagues knowing that that too shall pass. His peace fits D's warfare snugly. The clever casting of Robert Duvall who toned his usual macho bluster to near zero for the part only reinforces his character's genuine powers.
That's necessary, as Michael Douglas' put another notch in the Mr Mad America he'd been decorating since the eighties with the likes of Fatal Attraction and Wall Street. As a figure from the low rung of the white collar world in Falling Down who had run his career and then marriage into the ground and cannot comprehend how any of it happened, Douglas plays somewhere between reality and the kind of born yesterday naif of fable. When he says, "I'm the bad guy?" toward the end, the cabin briefly loses pressure and here endeth the lesson.
Joel Schumacher isn't a subtle filmmaker nor has ever pretended to be. He can make a good movie, though and there are plenty in his rap sheet but when it comes to this kind of social parable it can be difficult to work out quite what he is trying to say and to whom.
The late '80s and early '90s were busy at the cinema and a lot of lines were blurred. Erotic thrillers were harking back to '50s domestic values and sexual diversity othering was enjoying a revival. Were Tim Burtons movies made for kids or grown ups? Oh, and feminism was getting it in the neck again after a brief respite in the mid '80s. Who was Falling Down preaching to? Is Duvall's silent gen detective straightening out D's boomer mess? Barbara Hershey's turn as D's ex wife is solid even with the little she's given but there is a disturbing confusion between the actors playing D's mum and Duvall's neurotic bullying wife who not only look near identical but share an eerie monster-bearing passivity.
As a narrative progression straight up, this film works a treat. Not a shot wasted and not a scene a second too long. It is impossible to miss the points presented about the state of American society at the time, regardless of your position on them. As a whole piece this is not a racist movie but one ready to confront its audiences with teh phenomenon. Then again, it's not above fanning a few of those flames on the sure bet that they're warming up unspoken sympathy in the cinema.
Few would want to admit any empathy with Frederic Forrest's neo fascist and D's contempt of him might well have raised cheers that the sacking of the Korean shop might have ... then. The Korean shop scene now looks brutal and bullying, carrying only the barest of comedic intentions it was originally made to serve. And that's early. It's very hard to relate to D, even when he's railing against rigid fast food outlet rules about when breakfast stops and lunch begins. I remember the scene being funny but I was laughing from the outside, having no connection with the character. Looking at it now, after decades of mass shootings, it just looks brutal.
It also made me wonder how many Q-zombied conspiracists that stormed the Capitol building two years ago would have their own VHS copy of this movie in a shelf close to the old VCR, and how many upgraded disc versions. The thought that the real audience for this movie was only to emerge into action decades after frankly horrifies me. Is it fair to taint a decades old film with the atrocities of recent years? No, but as the film itself suggests, fairness can feel like a weapon. I don't mean the fairness of Duvall's one-good-cop as much as the imagined fairness of the righteous, deluded, patriotic bozos who were happy to nearly crush one of those cops in a glass doorway on January 6. Crusaders always think they're right and their witnesses know the reverse is more likely. We have both on screen here in a highly entertaining film. But who's it talking to?
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