Mark Reviews Movies: FALLING (2021)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 4, 2021

Falling doesn't possess or try to engender sympathy for its central character, an old and miserable and hateful man, but it certainly finds plenty of reasons to pity him. Some of this pity comes from his current health, failing from cancer and dementia, but most of it comes from the very fact of his personality—stubborn, bitter, argumentative. There is no changing Willis (Lance Henriksen) at this point in his life, far closer to the end than he realizes or wants to admit, and writer/director Viggo Mortensen spends most of this movie wondering if there ever was a chance for him to change.

The narrative of this movie, which also stars the filmmaker as Willis' son John, follows two stories at different points in Willis' life. In the present-day, seemingly around 2008 or so (The Presidential election comes up), John brings Willis to California from the father's farm in upstate New York. The son insists that Willis wanted to look for a home here, in order to be closer to his two children, but on the plane ride west, it quickly becomes apparent that Willis has no recollection of this decision.

He is lost in his past, as a younger man (played by Sverrir Gudnason) starting a family with his first wife Gwen (Hannah Gross). The movie's first scene, in fact, has the couple bringing a baby John home from the hospital.

"I'm sorry I brought you into this world," the younger Willis says to his baby boy, "so you could die." Whatever misery we see in the present-day Willis is nothing new. This is a man who didn't know happiness or anything akin to it back then, and if flashes of his stone-faced look on his wedding day and hints of his relationship with his own father are any indication, it's possible Willis has never known anything but gloom.

The movie lives in that feeling, and while it certainly illuminates how and why Willis and his family have arrived at this point in their lives, there's only so much we can obtain from such a narrow, fragmented perspective. The mood and information of the present and the past start to feel repetitive, and at a certain point, we just want to stop knowing Willis. There simply isn't too much to know about him.

He's a bigot, for sure. John is gay, married to Eric (Terry Chen) and raising an adopted daughter named Mönica (Gabby Velis). Willis quite comfortably and emphatically drops all sorts of slurs and insults John's way in regards to his sexuality. This has been a long-standing practice, and John has reached the point that he has given up on trying to stop his father. He's just not going to engage in the fight Willis is clearly trying to start. John may abstain from that on his end, but Willis just keeps going. It doesn't help that he's constantly forgetting certain things, so it's almost as if every attempt to start an argument is the first one from Willis' perspective. Laura Linney arrives in an extended cameo as John's sister, who has learned to change the subject as often as possible.

In the past, Mortensen's screenplay details the collapse of Willis' first marriage, his tenuous relationship with his children during his second marriage to Jill (Bracken Burns), and all kinds of resentment, anger, and suspicion that the younger Willis aimed at the people closest to him. Most of these memories belong Willis, but some of them are John's, too. The son recalls hearing and briefly seeing his mother crying alone on the couch. He remembers the time he stood up to his father, who complained about the length of his son hair before hitting him upside the head, and also how Willis put his hand on a younger John's shoulder sometime after that incident.

There are moments of quiet tenderness here, such as that scene (which Willis, apparently, thinks is all he had to do to apologize and convince his son that he loves him) and Willis' bond with his granddaughter, whom John and Eric protect from the old man's most odious rhetoric and outbursts. Do these moments say something different or reveal something deeper about Willis? They might have, in a story that looked deeper or farther back into the man's life, but in this movie, they are only brief respites from the constant verbal assaults and psychological damage he has inflicted—and continues to inflict—upon his family.

As monotonous as this sometimes becomes, there is some harsh, sad honesty within this story. Henriksen, as a man with no filter, plays Willis without any kind of filter, either. He makes no attempt to lessen or soften Willis' attitude and mindset. Even as the character's body and mind fail, the closet Henriksen comes to communicating anything other than the negative traits of this man is in portraying him as a pathetic figure—lost in some romanticized version of his past, which never existed because of what he has done.

Mortensen's directorial debut is admirable in the way it refuses to sentimentalize Willis in any way, and his first screenplay is thoughtful and probing in the way it merges and juxtaposes the present with the past. Falling, though, mostly offers pain upon pain, misery upon misery, and insult upon injury. Its insights end there.

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