Falling Down

Falling Down (1993) opens with a man abandoning his car in Los Angeles traffic and walking, and it escalates across the day. His name is never given; he is known by the plate on his car, D-FENS. He worked in defence, was laid off, is divorced, and is barred from seeing his daughter. He decides to get to her birthday and crosses the city on foot. Every obstruction on the way turns into a reckoning: a restaurant that has stopped serving breakfast, a shopkeeper raising prices, roadworks. The difficulty is this: the man is filmed like a hero and what he does is indefensible. That doubleness is deliberate and it caused argument; some read the film as a defence of that anger and others as an exposure of it. The second story is a policeman on his last day before retirement, and the two men close on each other across the day. The scene with the Korean shopkeeper drew objections from Korean American organisations and the film was criticised for it for years. It is among Michael Douglas's best work; he does not make the character likeable but makes him legible. Joel Schumacher directed. The last scene answers the whole film: only there does the man understand what he is. It runs 113 minutes. Good for: character drama, the nineties, and city films. Less good for: there is violence, the film is uncomfortably ambiguous, and some scenes are open to racist readings.