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CHILD OF THE PATIENT: Viggo Mortensen in “Falling.” Photo: Nordisk Film
The old man yells at everyone and everything.
DRAMA
“Falling”
U.S. 12 years. Directed by Viggo Mortensen
With: Lance Henriksen, Viggo Mortensen, Sverrir Gudnason, Laura Linney, Hannah Gross
John (Mortensen) is an apple that has rolled away from the trunk. Now he’s sitting on a plane from the east coast to the west coast with this same “tribe”: his father Willis (Henriksen).
John wants his father to visit a doctor in California and maybe find a place to live there too. Winters on the northern farm are harsh for a sick and possibly presenile aging.
Willis is a hard-hitting old-school man to that extent. The first words she said to her newborn son were these: “I’m sorry, I brought you into this world, so you must die.” If Willis was already grumpy and disillusioned when he was young (and played by Gudnason), there was nothing against what he is now. Two broken marriages and life in general have made him a tremendously unhappy and deeply reactionary man.
A BARN OF A MAN VILLAGE: Lance Henriksen in “Falling.” Photo: Nordisk Film
That John is gay and has a daughter with another man, Eric (Terry Chen), doesn’t add to Willis’s joy. Willis believes that everyone who lives in “liberal California” is gay or about to become gay, and that you can get AIDS by swimming in the Pacific Ocean. That the son, the boy he taught to hunt ducks and fallow deer, be one of them, it is extremely difficult for him to live with him.
“California is a cocksucker and people burn flags,” he hisses as he looks at the Obama label on his son’s refrigerator door. “Did you vote for that nigga?” Back in the old days, in the 1960s and 1970s, Willis was a breadwinner who always had to say “it’s glove home ‘when he quarreled with his wives. Now he stops at a fish tank in a restaurant, farts loudly and yells “whores!” the goldfish.
EVERYBODY IS GAY IN CALIFORNIA: Viggo Mortensen (left) and Terry Chen in “Falling.” Photo: Nordisk Film
It’s a handful, as you can see. But he continues fatherfor both John and his daughter Sarah (Linney). Danish-American actor Viggo Mortensen, making his debut here as a screenwriter and director, should congratulate Willis for remaining a man with whom it is actually possible to feel genuine sympathy, no matter how damn he behaves.
Willis, Mortensen understands, is the product of a childhood and the time in which it passed. And he is the victim of his morbid jealousy. The two breakups have taught the father to hate almost everyone, particularly women. “His mother was a prostitute and a gay breeder,” he tells John and Sarah. Deep down, he is so hungry to be loved again that he constantly confuses his mother and stepmother.
YOUNG FATHER: Hannah Gross and Sverrir Gudnason in “Falling.” Photo: Nordisk Film
This drama about what we now call “toxic masculinity” is obviously close and personal to Mortensen’s heart. The scenes of the present are like little camera works. The scenes from the past are sentimentally sensual in the style of a Terrence Malick movie.
It is acting performances that elevate “Falling” above the ordinary. He’s solid in every way and absolutely powerful in the case of the Norwegian-American Henriksen. He’s an underrated actor who has an extraordinarily meaty role to tackle here. It makes Willis a disgusting man who we care deeply about.
“DID YOU CHOOSE THE COLOR?”: Lance Henriksen (left) doesn’t let Viggo Mortensen get much peace in “Falling.” Photo: Nordisk Film
(It’s also kind of funny that Mortensen’s former director of “A History Of Violence” (2005) and “Eastern Promises” (2007) – David Cronenberg – has a small role – as a proctologist …).
“Falling” is a little too repetitive, a little too much inside with a teaspoon, to be called a stalwart hit. What it is is a good drama with good acting. At the end of the 2020 film year, that’s more than enough.
