30 dAyS oF cRAzY: Falling Down

There's a point where something crosses over from beyond a black comedy into something darker, where you go from laughing ath things you probably shouldn't be laughing at to catching yourself thinking "whoa, this isn't funny anymore." Falling Down is all over that point, that place of darkness, and today, The Lightning Bug examines just why that is. Great movie - I really could go for another viewing.

Stay tuned throughout September for nuttiness and zaniness of all varieties - click here for the full lineup, and click here for prior entries.

From the first shot, a intense close-up of teeth that pulls out slowly to reveal the sweaty upper lip, the eyes, and the horn rim glasses of William ‘D-Fens’ Foster, director Joel Schumacher establishes the pressure cooker feeling pervades his 1993 film Falling Down. As he sits in a traffic jam, the inside of his car seems to be visibly steaming with heat as he sits motionless. The world is a cacophony of sound. The air conditioner doesn’t work. The window won’t roll down. A child stares. The sharp, pointed,painted on teeth of a stuffed Garfield doll suddenly become filled with malice. William Foster has had enough, and all he wants to do is go home. So he gets out of his car and begins a journey that will take him far into the depth of Los Angeles and far out of his mind.

These days Joel Schumacher is best remembered as the man who put nipples on Batman, but in the late ’80’s he was on an incredible run of films that conventional wisdom would say started with 1985’s St. Elmo’s Fire. If you ask me it kicked off two years earlier with D.C. Cab. I mean that film had Busey in it, and that alone merits it a mention in a post about crazy people in films. After looking at all sides of death with Flatliners, The Lost Boys, and Dying Young, Schumacher turned his eye to the world of the living with Falling Down. The script by actor and occasional screenwriter Ebbe Roe Smith was so prescient of the tension building on the streets of L.A. that while the film was being shot, the riots that followed the O.J. Simpson verdict broke out.

After Falling Down came out, Michael Douglas’ performance as the out of work defense worker William Foster became the poster child for the “angry white man”. In many publications his character was cast as the embodiment of the marginalized white male. A man feeling attacked by the wilting economy, his broken marriage, and the perceived infringements of his liberty by government, immigrants, and big corporations. While there is always a fringe element that’s political or moral beliefs stray outside the norm, it always scared me that Foster was sometimes perceived as a heroic character. Falling Down is being included in 30 Days of Crazy not because the world around the protagonist had gone mad, but rather because Foster becomes completely unhinged, disregarding anything but his own rapidly warping moral compass. In simple terms, he was a massive, massive wing nut.

Many of us might have a passing daydream that we could leave our car in traffic, demand that the fast food place serve breakfast after the cut off time, or call shenanigans on a construction crew repairing a road that seems just fine. The average person will stay in their car, settle for an apple pie and just call it breakfast, and just find an alternate route around traffic all the while saving up their anger to take out on friends, wives, husbands or other relations like normal people do. ‘D-Fens’ Foster felt that the world had taken everything from him and it was time to take something back. When I watch the news and see some extremist, homegrown or foreign, taking lives to prove their point or moral stance, my thoughts instantly go back to the special insanity exhibited by Michael Douglas’ character.

While Falling Down also features an excellent performance by Robert Duvall as the cop spending his last day on the job following Foster’s bloody path, Duvall’s solid acting is quickly overshadowed by Douglas’ more inspired character and performance. In 1993, Falling Down served as a warning to a world that would see homegrown terrorism and radicals rise up in the next few years during events such as Waco, Ruby Ridge, and the Okalahoma City bombing. All of these groups were lead in some way by white American men who felt like their voice had gone unheard and had clearly also gone Kookoo for Cocoa Puffs. Today we live in a world where folks regularly show up at political rallies with a firearm in tow, and people like William Foster that sit in their homes absorbing a stream of politically television designed to feed the ostracized‘s paranoia. Falling Down should serve as more than just a reflection of the early nineties tensions. It is also a warning that there will always be a danger in society lurking as close as the next disturbed person that gets pushed too far.

Tomorrow: Jess gets all cozy inside A Beautiful Mind.

And then...

30 dAyS oF cRAzY: The Jacket

I had high hopes for The Jacket and was pretty let down, but was The Lightning Bug?

Stay tuned throughout September for nuttiness and zaniness of all varieties - click here for the full lineup, and click here for prior entries (which won't do you much good today, what with this being the first - madness!).

Welcome to the first of two entries I’ll be making for the 30 Days of Crazy event.

For my first film, I’m taking a look at 2005’s The Jacket starring Adrien Brody. Recently, Mr. Brody has become something of a Scream King with his turns in Predators, Splice, and Dario Argento’s Giallo. If you look back over his career, he’s always chosen strange little genre films, like appearing as a scientist in Mario Van Peebles Solo. Though he cemented himself in the public consciousness with Polanski’s The Pianist (2002), only three years removed from his Academy Award winning turn as the tragic ivory tickler, he took on the starring role in first time feature director Maybury’s thriller.

The Jacket stars Brody as Jack Starks, a Gulf War veteran who is sent to an asylum after being accused of shooting a police officer. His doctor, Thomas Becker (Kris Kristofferson), begins to use an experimental treatment on Starks, putting him in a straightjacket and closing him inside a morgue drawer. Starks begins to have experiences that he believes are travels fifteen years into the future to 2007 where he learns of his own impending death in four days. He also meets a girl, Jackie Price (Keira Knightly), whose past he affected when she was a child, and he uses the experiences going back and forth through time to change her future for the better.

The real question when it comes to The Jacket is what, as a viewer, you want to accept as real. Brody’s character at no time seems stable, and the film's events can be taken two ways. Either Jack Starks, an already damaged war veteran and possible cop killer, had a series of visions where he absolves himself of past wrongs by saving Jackie or Starks, an innocent man, traveled through time and did a good deed before he died. So either he’s crazy as a bedbug or the human equivalent of the letter in The Lake House. Personally, I could see it both ways. The hopeless romantic in me wanted his quest to rectify the bad things that happened in Jackie‘s life, but my cynical side kicked in, and I left the film feeling sorry for Starks as he spent his last few moments with his mind escaping into a fantasy world.

Speaking of crazy, one of the most fascinating things I learned while looking into The Jacket was the connection to Jack London. I know. Right now, you’re probably saying, “That Jack London?” Yep, Mr. Jack “White Fang, Call of the Wild, boring your ass to death in high school” London apparently wrote some books that didn’t have even a little Yukon in them. His 1915 novel The Star Rover, known in the United Kingdom as The Jacket, was a fictionalized account of San Quentin inmate Ed Morrell’s experiences in solitary confinement. In London’s book, his hero is subjected to a torturous jacket while he is in jail, but when he enters a trancelike state, he can travel across space and time. Though three writers are credited with the film, London’s name was not mentioned. However in interviews promoting the film director Maybury credited the book as inspiration.

For a first feature film, Maybury, who had previously directed short films and videos for Cindy Lauper and Sinead O’Connor, puts in an impressive effort packing the film with visually appealing shots. He also gets some solid performances from his actors. Adrien Brody is the rock that the film is built on. I am generally interested in him as an actor, and he did not disappoint, plumbing the film’s emotional depths for all they were worth. He even went method on the role insisting that Maybury lock him in just like his character and film him with a locked camera. The result is right in the film. When an emotionally raw Starks loses it, you are actually witnessing the real breakdown that Brody had while dedicating himself to the role. Veteran actor Kristofferson provides some great menace as the diabolical doctor who puts the treatment to Starks, and Knightly performs well as the damsel in distress including one of the better American accents that I’ve ever heard her perform.

The Jacket did have a number of weaknesses, and one of them is that I only had three actors to bother mentioning in the whole of the film. Jennifer Jason Leigh, Kelly Lynch, Brad Renfro, Daniel Craig, Mackenzie Phillips, and Jason Lewis all make appearances, but none of them stuck out in my mind at all, and quite a few of them had the potential to make more of their brief appearances. I was also quite hard to follow at times, and I occasionally needed a diagram to help me figure out what was happening. It added to the crazed atmosphere, but it did little to allow overall enjoyment. Altogether, The Jacket is a manic experience that lives up to being in a marathon of crazy films. It dabbles in interesting concepts, but it never can decide what it exactly feels about them. It wasn’t full of enough problems to put me in a straightjacket, but I was sure glad I had blog therapy to look forward to after.

Bugg Rating

Tomorrow: We'll catch up with both Ivan of Thrilling Days of Yesteryear and his journey down the Shock Corridor and count to Se7en with Detailed Criticism's Sebastian.

And then...