Falling Down (1993)

Official trailer

Falling Down is the 1993 Joel Schumacher-directed urban thriller starring Michael Douglas as William Foster, a recently laid-off defense industry engineer who abandons his car in a Los Angeles traffic jam and walks across the city committing increasingly violent acts in response to perceived urban injustices. Robert Duvall plays Detective Martin Prendergast, a retiring Los Angeles police officer on his final day of service who pursues Foster across the same city. Ebbe Roe Smith wrote the screenplay.

The supporting cast includes Barbara Hershey as Foster’s ex-wife Beth, Rachel Ticotin as Prendergast’s partner Detective Sandra Torres, and a series of secondary characters across the city whom Foster encounters during his walk. Arnold Kopelson produced the film on a budget of approximately twenty-five million dollars, and Warner Bros. released it. The production grossed approximately ninety-six million dollars worldwide.

Almost no thriller from its decade disturbs me more than Falling Down.

I spend the whole film half-agreeing with a man I ought to be backing away from, and I think that discomfort is exactly what Douglas and Schumacher wanted. It’s funny, it’s ugly, and it knows more about American resentment than most films on the subject. My only real gripe is the phone calls from Prendergast’s wife, which I’d have trimmed by half.

The film works as a parallel pursuit. Foster walks west across Los Angeles toward his ex-wife’s house in Venice, and Prendergast follows the trail of incidents he leaves behind. The two never meet until the final sequence on the Venice pier.

That lets the film build both men across the runtime without forcing them together too early. We see Foster’s escalating violence from his side and Prendergast’s investigation from his.

The audience experiences both characters as protagonists in parallel through the structural separation. Parallel narrative structure can develop two characters more effectively than direct interaction would have allowed.

The D-Fens Performance

Michael Douglas plays William Foster as a man whose entire personal infrastructure has collapsed. Foster has lost his defense industry engineering job through corporate downsizing related to post-Cold War defense spending reductions.

Foster has lost his marriage to a wife who has filed a restraining order against him. Foster has lost custody of his young daughter. Foster’s white-collar professional identity, his suburban family identity, and his sense of social stability have all been removed across an unspecified period before the film begins.

The character enters the narrative in a state of accumulated grievance that requires only a triggering incident to release. The Los Angeles traffic jam in the opening sequence provides that trigger. The audience experiences Foster’s accumulated state through Douglas’s performance choices instead of through expositional dialogue.

The performance walks a narrow line. Foster must be sufficiently sympathetic that audiences understand his grievances. Foster must be sufficiently dangerous that audiences recognize the violence as monstrous. The performance must produce both responses at once. Douglas plays Foster with a calm and articulate surface that masks accumulating rage. The character explains his actions through reasonable-sounding arguments about social decay, economic injustice, and personal entitlement to dignity. The articulate surface makes the violence more disturbing instead of less.

The audience watches a recognizably middle-class American professional commit increasingly extreme acts while justifying each act through arguments that sound similar to grievances that real middle-class American professionals articulate. Strong performance can hold audiences in uncomfortable territory across an extended runtime. Douglas doesn’t let the audience escape into easy categorization of the character.

I think this is the best work of Douglas’s career. It disturbs me how polite Foster stays while he’s terrifying people. He sounds like a man filing a complaint with management, and that calm scares me more than any amount of shouting would have.

The Prendergast Counterweight

Robert Duvall plays Martin Prendergast as the structural counterweight to Foster. Both characters are middle-aged white professional men whose identities are dissolving. Prendergast is retiring from the Los Angeles Police Department on his final day of service. Prendergast’s wife is psychologically dependent on him to the point of phoning constantly throughout his workday. Prendergast has been kept on desk duty for years following an incident the film addresses gradually. The character occupies social space adjacent to Foster’s space without occupying identical territory. Both characters have lost their professional foundations.

Both characters are watching their personal lives contract. The film uses this structural similarity to develop its central thematic argument.

The argument is that Foster and Prendergast represent two responses to the same conditions. Foster responds to professional displacement, personal loss, and accumulated grievance through violence directed outward. Prendergast responds to the same constellation of pressures through professional commitment and personal patience. The two characters embody the choice the film places before its audience. The choice is presented through structure instead of through dialogue. Neither character lectures the other about the right response. The audience watches both responses across the runtime and draws the relevant conclusions through observation.

You can develop thematic argument through structural parallel instead of through expositional content. The film conveys its politics through the comparison instead of through assertion.

Duvall plays the part small, and I love him for it. The patience in his performance does more to argue the film’s case than anything Foster says, and that quiet decency keeps the movie from sliding into a revenge fantasy.

The Encounter Sequences

Foster’s walk across Los Angeles produces a sequence of encounters that function as the film’s episodic structure.

The Korean convenience store sequence establishes Foster’s pattern: a grievance presented as reasonable, an escalation to violence, a withdrawal from the scene. The gang territory sequence shows Foster surviving an attempted robbery and acquiring a duffel bag of weapons. The Whammyburger fast food sequence develops Foster’s complaints about how the service economy treats customers, and it’s the film’s most quoted material.

The neo-Nazi army surplus store sequence provides the film’s clearest political statement: Foster rejects the neo-Nazi owner’s assumption that they share an ideology, and the rejection produces the sequence’s violence.

The construction site sequence develops Foster’s complaints about civic spending priorities. The wealthy golf course sequence develops Foster’s complaints about class privilege. Each sequence is structured similarly but escalates the violence and the political content.

The army surplus store is the scene I’d point to if anybody doubted the film knew what it was doing. The owner assumes Foster is one of his own, Foster wants no part of him, and that’s where I stopped worrying the movie was on the angry man’s side. The Whammyburger scene gets quoted more, and it’s very funny, but the surplus store is the one that makes the film matter to me.

The structural choice matters. The film could have told Foster’s walk as one continuous story without episode breaks. The episodes let each encounter make its own point about one corner of urban American life in 1992, and together they add up to the film’s broader argument about social decay and how one man responds to it. Each episode works as a scene on its own, and they accumulate into the larger story.

The technique comes from picaresque literature, which develops its protagonists through a series of distinct encounters with different social environments. The film’s contribution is applying that old structure to a contemporary urban thriller, and I think it’s the smartest decision in the script. Every stop on Foster’s walk feels like a different Los Angeles, and I was never bored by where he’d end up next.

Is Falling Down as good as people say?

Of the early 1990s urban thrillers, Falling Down is among the most accomplished and among the strongest character studies in the careers of both Michael Douglas and Robert Duvall. The film’s commitment to uncomfortable character work, its structural parallel between Foster and Prendergast, and its picaresque episodic organization across the Los Angeles geography produce a work that works effectively as thriller, as character study, and as social commentary. It has aged well across the three decades since its release.

The grievances Foster voices are still voiced by real middle-class professionals in nearly the same words, and the film’s questions about how people respond to that pressure haven’t gone anywhere. I give it a 9 because it makes me laugh, squirm and argue with myself inside the same scene. The only thing keeping it from a 10 for me is the handful of domestic scenes that slow the chase. The Whammyburger bit is famous for good reason, and the whole film is richer than that clip.

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