![]() With his shipshape crew cut, his white short sleeve dress shirt with the skinny tie and the white plastic pocket protector bulging with ballpoints, D-FENS (played with serviceable action-hero intensity by Michael Douglas) is an Everyman figure so average that he's known only by the name on his license plate. It's the grim chart at the end of our hospital beds.įor that reason, very little of what its protagonist endures seems unfamiliar. If the last election was about change, the soul sickness shown in "Falling Down" reflects precisely why that change was essential. Written by Ebbe Roe Smith, the movie appraises the state of our national disease in a manner that goes far beyond what economic indicators tell us. And if things were bad in 1976 when Beale urged viewers to join him in proclaiming "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore," the intervening years have only made matters worse.Īs a description of our collective recession-era funk, "Falling Down" is to the early '90s what "Network" was to the late '70s. ![]() All it has to do is strike a nerve, and "Falling Down," director Joel Schumacher's hysterical movie editorial about a man stretched to the breaking point by the traumas of everyday life, certainly digs its instruments into our most sensitive social fibers.Įssentially, the movie picks up where Howard Beale, the deranged anchorman in "Network" - another less than great milestone movie - left off. ![]() A film doesn't have to be great - or even very good - to be found important as a kind of cultural landmark. ![]()
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