Falling is a labor of love from Viggo Mortensen, star, writer, and director of a movie whose premise is basically what if Pierce Hawthorne but two hours. The film is a character study of one deeply selfish, imperfect father, slowly dying of old age and his incredibly patient son. It seems like Viggo is playing a bit of a game to see how much he and his audience can handle of the filthy-mouthed, retrograde homophobic, misogynistic language spewing from his father Willis’s mouth before he loses it. His microscopic flinches, his sighs, and the tiny cracks in his armor throughout are reminiscent of God of Carnage by Yasmina Reza, where politeness and civility are played for laughs and contrast with the incivility of the second act.
The periodic flashbacks from both memories from Willis and his son John make for some interesting respites from the present day, but don’t do much to explain their relationship or personalities. If anything, the point of those flashbacks seems to be to complicate the father and make us even more sympathetic to the ever-patient John. Some reviewers, I expect, will find this accretion of experience to make for well-rounded, deep characters, but I think there’s little here that’s original, except really the filthiness of Willis’s language and the exploration of sexuality in dementia. I don’t really know if those novelties are welcome and there’s something a little limp about the constant bombardment of horny old man talk, which maybe is the point, but also doesn’t make for interesting arcs or insightful dialogue.
Willis’s put upon mother has some of the most cathartic scenes, though she’s always asking her husband to take off his boots, because she also is able to stand up to him where everyone else must walk on eggshells because of his caustic mood swings. Laura Linney plays the younger sister to John–her moments on screen really pale in comparison to the care and attention with which Mortensen plays John. He is subtle where she is broadcasting. He is opaque, where she wears everything on her sleeves. Especially the sequence where we watch her react to the sexual commentary of her father’s conquests while he fantasizes about naked past loves on horses feels really violating, and the use of the term “sundowning” does more telling than showing.
The final image of Willis having sex with maybe a horse who is his first wife as she moans up above him is bizarre, especially when juxtaposed with a dedication to Viggo’s two sons in the credits and should’ve been an indication of some serious editing that could’ve occurred. The blowout in the third act is not worth the warm up from the first ninety minutes.
