Falling Down

Starring: Michael Douglas

Directed by: Joel Schumacher

RS: Not Rated

1993 Drama

For most of this long day's journey into nightmare, we don't know the name of the character Michael Douglas is playing. But we recognize him. With his brush cut, white shirt, pocket protector, briefcase and perpetually harried look, he's one of Clinton's beleaguered middle class. The recession has cost him his job at a defense plant, and he's coming unglued. Sweating in traffic in the smoggy glare of an L.A. morning, he bolts from his car and stalks off the freeway. Later the cops, led by Detective Prendergast (Robert Duvall), will call him D-FENS after the plate on the car he ditched.

D-FENS heads for a pay phone to call his ex-wife (Barbara Hershey). Though she left him because of his bad temper, he wants to come home for their daughter's birthday. Looking for coins to make the call, he tries a local deli, but the Korean proprietor refuses to make change without a purchase. Grabbing a baseball bat from behind the counter, D-FENS bashes every overpriced item in the place. His fury subsided, he calmly leaves the store, still carrying the bat.

With this scene, director Joel Schumacher, a long way from the young-Hollywood glitz of St. Elmo's Fire and Flatliners, hits the ground running. He gives this explosive drama a whiplash intensity that never lets up. What Ebbe Roe Smith's script lacks in subtlety it makes up for in drive. There's no denying the power of the tale or of Douglas's riveting performance -- his best and riskiest since Wall Street. Douglas neither demonizes nor canonizes this flawed character. Marching across a violent urban landscape toward an illusory home, this shattered Everyman is never less than real.

D-FENS finds his bat handy when he's hassled by two switchblade-wielding Hispanic gang members. In revenge, they shoot at him from their car but wind up killing themselves in a freak accident. After taking their bag of guns and knives, D-FENS stops at a fast-food restaurant and pulls a gun after the smirking manager tells him he's missed the breakfast deadline by a few minutes. When the gun goes off by accident, spraying the ceiling with bullets, a women in the crowd blows her lunch. "Critic," says D-FENS with a twisted grin. Later he aims a bazooka at a men working sign (he's fed up with unnecessary road repair) but can't fire the weapon until a kid in the crowd shows him how -- the kid learned it from TV.

These perversely funny scenes, exaggerating an impatience we all feel, may open the film to charges of glorifying violence. But Falling Down is no Death Wish, and D-FENS is no vigilante hero in the Charlie Bronson tradition. He's a man losing his moral balance, and he's not alone. Andrzej Bartkowiak's camera shows an L.A. teeming with racism and hate crimes, as the dispossessed scream their rage into a vacuum. D-FENS is a ticking bomb. His wife tells the police he never hurt her, but she expected him to erupt any minute. Now the streets have armed him. A murderous encounter with the Jewhating, gay-bashing owner of an army-surplus store, played by a memorably over-the-top Frederic Forrest, sends D-FENS spiraling into madness.

Prendergast, believing that D-FENS intends to kill his family and himself, spends his last day on the job trying to catch him. Duvall's role is burdened with pulp-movie clichTs in the form of a sexy young partner (Rachel Ticotin) and a neurotic wife (Tuesday Weld). But Duvall, superb as always, cuts to the core of a man who also knows the trauma of being disconnected. His wife, fragile since the crib death of their baby, has forced him into a desk job and early retirement.

The two men meet in a wrenching climax on a pier in Venice, where D-FENS holds his own family hostage. The fear in the eyes of his little girl gives D-FENS a terrifying flash of how far he's fallen. "I'm the bad guy?" he asks in disbelief. Douglas speaks the line with a searing poignancy that illuminates uncomfortable truths without excusing the character. Schumacher could have exploited those tabloid headlines about solid citizens going berserk. Instead, the timely, gripping Falling Down puts a human face on a cold statistic and then dares us to look away.

PETER TRAVERS
RS 651