Review/Film; Urban Horrors, All Too Familiar

In the eerie opening sequence of "Falling Down," a man identified by his license plate as D-Fens (Michael Douglas) sits in his car, brought to a halt in a gigantic Los Angeles freeway tie-up. The stalled lanes of glass, chrome and paint jobs sparkle in the midmorning sun, which is very hot. Nothing moves except the tiny beads of sweat on the man's face. They slip down his brow from his military-style brush haircut to his jaw, which is clenched against life. The man grips the steering wheel and stares straight ahead through gold-rimmed glasses.

All is silent at first, as if the man had willed that his mind be blank. Yet little by little, the sounds of the outside world drain into his (and the movie's) consciousness: vulgar (to him) rock music, laughter, arguments, children. Someone is yelling into a cellular phone. Without visible emotion, the man takes his briefcase and gets out of his car. The fellow in the car behind angrily asks what he thinks he's doing. D-Fens ignores the other's fury. He walks across the road, up an embankment and away from the miles of stalled automobiles, away from urban order and sanity.

"Falling Down" plays a lot of such tricks. It turns one man's slide toward madness into a wickedly mischievous, entertaining suspense thriller. On one side is D-Fens, who, having abandoned his car, moves with purpose across Los Angeles by foot, leaving a trail of casually mangled bodies on street corners, in a clothing store, on a golf course. In pursuit are Detective Prendergast (Robert Duvall) and his colleagues of the Los Angeles Police Department. At first with some boredom, then with apprehension and horror, they follow the trail of the man who keeps saying he just wants to get home.

D-Fens, played by Mr. Douglas with astonishing, thin-lipped authority, is a little bit like a paranoid paperback update on Neddy Merrill of John Cheever's story "The Swimmer." Neddy sets out to swim home through the pools of Fairfield County on a bright summer day, encountering a lifetime of failures as he goes. The daylong journey of D-Fens is equally sad and futile, though far less gentle. As he makes his way toward a small house in Venice, and to the ex-wife who has a restraining order against him, he repays a few of the random injustices he has been collecting throughout his adult life. He's a hard-working, tax-paying, politically concerned, white, middle-class American male, and his patience has run out.

What, for example, is a man to do when he walks into a Whammyburger at 11:33 A.M. and is told by the manager, who calls him buddy, that he can't have breakfast because this Whammyburger stops serving breakfast at 11:30? "I don't want to be your buddy," D-Fens says evenly. "I just want breakfast." "Well, hey," says the manager, "I'm really sorry." Replies D-Fens, "Well, hey, I am too." To stress his need, he pulls out a gun and starts shooting at a ceiling fixture.

This is one of the milder, funnier sequences in a succession of increasingly brutal confrontations from which, finally, there is no return.

As directed by Joel Schumacher from an original screenplay by Ebbe Roe Smith, "Falling Down" is a movie that couldn't possibly have been made anywhere else in the world today. It exemplifies a quintessentially American kind of pop movie making that, with skill and wit, sends up stereotypical attitudes while also exploiting them with insidious effect. "Falling Down" is glitzy, casually cruel, hip and grim. It's sometimes very funny, and often nasty in the way it manipulates one's darkest feelings.

There is an early encounter between D-Fens and the apprehensive Korean man (Michael Paul Chan) behind the counter of a convenience store. When the Korean refuses to give D-Fens change for the telephone, D-Fens pretends not to understand what the man is saying. He criticizes the Korean for not pronouncing his V's. "Speak slowly and distinctly," he says. One thing leads to another, and the seething customer seizes the Korean's baseball bat and breaks up the store.

Mr. Douglas is terrific in what must be one of the richest, if most thoroughly unpleasant, and difficult roles of his career. It's not a role that reveals much. The character's background is that of thousands of other men who don't go to pieces, at least not in such an irretrievable way. D-Fens has lost his job in the defense industry, but he was a bit odd even before that. He always had a violent side that frightened both his mother (Lois Smith) and his former wife (Barbara Hershey).

D-Fens is not immediately identifiable as a right-wing bigot. In the film's most furiously disorienting sequence, he takes umbrage when a neo-Nazi goon (Frederic Forrest) assumes he's a member of the club. Yet it's an indication of how the movie plays with ambiguities that the reaction of D-Fens can also be interpreted as the ultimate in denial.

"Falling Down" is not meant to be seen as the anatomy of a madman, but as a spectacle of civil despair in which some people give in to galvanizing self-pity and others cope as best they can. Among these is Mr. Duvall's Detective Prendergast, a policeman whose career has been hobbled by the demands of a needy wife (Tuesday Weld). By chance, this is the detective's last day on the job before he takes early retirement. Without making a big thing out of it, the movie suggests that D-Fens and Prendergast have some resentments in common.

Mr. Smith, an actor who makes his screenwriting debut with "Falling Down," has created a most effective urban panorama with a minimum of exposition. "Falling Down" exists very much in the present tense, a lot like the screenplay Mr. Schumacher wrote for "Car Wash" (1976), directed by Michael Schultz, one of the funnier films to come out of the 1970's. The writing is sharp, alive and quickly to the point, which may be a reason why there are so many fine performances. Actors can realize characters, but they don't often write their own material.

Mr. Duvall and all the members of the huge supporting cast are excellent, including Rachel Ticotin, who plays Mr. Duvall's police partner. It's a small role, that of a character who is quite normal in the context of the rest of the film, but it's as memorable as anything else in the movie.

Mr. Schumacher would seem to be both nervy and exceptionally able, effortlessly integrating scenes of carnage with others that have the blithely heedless humor of a "Saturday Night Live" sketch. Consider a scene in which a small black boy solemnly instructs the mad-as-a-hatter D-Fens on how to load, aim and fire a bazooka. It's something the boy knows how to do from watching television, and he's proud of himself.

"Falling Down" is going to offend many people, though not, I think, with good reason. Unlike most so-called problem movies, it offers no positive approach to the problems it so coolly observes. Some may call that irresponsible, possibly the same people who find "Terminator 2" so much fun. By not providing phony uplift, "Falling Down" doesn't let the audience off the hook of its own responsibilities.

It's also the most interesting, all-out commercial American film of the year to date, and one that will function much like a Rorschach test to expose the secrets of those who watch it.

"Falling Down," which has been rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian), has a lot of violence and obscene language. Falling Down

Directed by Joel Schumacher; written by Ebbe Roe Smith; director of photography, Andrzej Bartkowiak; edited by Paul Hirsch; music by James Newton Howard; production designer, Barbara Ling; produced by Arnold Kopelson, Herschel Weingrod and Timothy Harris; released by Warner Brothers. Running time: 112 minutes. This film is rated R. D-Fens . . . Michael Douglas Prendergast . . . Robert Duvall Beth . . . Barbara Hershey Sandra . . . Rachel Ticotin Mrs. Prendergast . . . Tuesday Weld Surplus Store Owner . . . Frederic Forrest D-Fens's Mother . . . Lois Smith Adele . . . Joey Hope Singer Guy on Freeway . . . Ebbe Roe Smith Mr. Lee . . . Michael Paul Chan