Falling

To scan through a CV which is, to put it mild­ly, dizzy­ing­ly eclec­tic, you’d like­ly have a tough time guess­ing what type of film the actor Vig­go Mortensen might make were he to step behind the cam­era. Toss in all his well-doc­u­ment­ed sup­ple­men­tary inter­ests, such as music, poet­ry, foot­ball, paint­ing and pho­tog­ra­phy, and it’s tough to get a han­dle on which way this thing might go.

The biggest shock of Falling, Mortensen’s debut as writer and direc­tor, is just how care­ful, wist­ful and tra­di­tion­al­ly dra­mat­ic it is. There’s no exper­i­men­ta­tion, no sense that he’s try­ing to prove him­self as an image mak­er, or pea­cock­ing with unnec­es­sary lit­er­ary flour­ish­es in the script. This is stripped-back, robust, obser­va­tion­al film­mak­ing that dares to allow a scene to be more than just a con­tain­er for key infor­ma­tion. It also allows char­ac­ters to exist in that lim­i­nal space between antag­o­nism and empa­thy, rather than pack­ing them off on a for­mu­la­ic jour­ney from one to the other.

To put it more blunt­ly, Falling is a deeply unfash­ion­able film, but it’s unfash­ion­able in the same way that a Clint East­wood film is unfash­ion­able – i.e., it still man­ages to exude a sense of hand-tooled qual­i­ty. The star here is Lance Hen­rik­sen who plays aggres­sive­ly can­tan­ker­ous patri­arch Willis – and it’s great to see this peren­ni­al genre movie bit-parter final­ly giv­en a part to sink his teeth into.

Willis’ appli­ca­tion of strict con­ser­v­a­tive prin­ci­ples dur­ing his for­ma­tive rur­al home life have led to inevitable humil­i­a­tion in his twi­light years, as he’s so hard­wired to a cer­tain unre­con­struct­ed mind­set that every­one and every­thing just seems to sick­en him. He’s start­ing to lose his mar­bles and isn’t able to care for him­self, so his son John (Mortensen) gath­ers him up and carts him to Los Ange­les for a spell, where he must put up with pro­gres­sive lib­er­al types forc­ing their alter­na­tive lifestyles in his face. John, for instance, is gay, but has become immune to his father’s per­pet­u­al taunts. He has purged any notion of self-hatred from his heart, and is able to live a life of moral self-right­eous­ness with­out ever feel­ing guilty about it.

The title of the film sug­gests a fall from grace, but for Willis it’s more like a fall from arro­gance to ignominy. This is about the pow­er that a con­ser­v­a­tive father assumes and wields, and how time caus­es that pow­er to dimin­ish and, even­tu­al­ly, dis­ap­pear. He tilts at wind­mills as those around him smile with pity in the knowl­edge that sal­va­tion is per­haps pos­si­ble, but def­i­nite­ly not worth all the elbow grease. That his mind isn’t what it was and his body is slow­ly ail­ing serves as a metaphor for a regres­sive atti­tude that has cal­ci­fied in his bones – a rejec­tion of the restora­tive qual­i­ties of love, regret and com­mon sense which he stead­fast­ly refus­es to embrace.

It’s an easy film to find fault with and it’s earnest to a tee, yet Mortensen is dig­ging at some­thing com­plex and elu­sive in a way that is sat­is­fy­ing­ly sim­ple, direct and clear-eyed. His own per­for­mance arrives with no stud­ied bells and whis­tles, while his shoot­ing style does lit­tle to dis­rupt from the heavy lift­ing being done by per­for­mance and script. Per­haps its biggest plus point is that it gives us a jum­bo-sized ass­hole like Willis, whose entire life has been pow­ered by hate and venal­i­ty, and dares to ask: how can you not empathise with this trag­ic lug?