Falling Down.

Falling Down is a dishonest film but it's not hard to see how its very dishonestly has made it a hit. Written by Ebbe Roe Smith and directed by Joel Schumacher, this is a vigilante movie with a heart of (fool's) gold. The feeling of justified vengefulness it methodically arouses in the audience for most of its running time is punished only in the last few minutes. Falling Down has its poisonous cake and eats it, too.

The action unfolds in parallel lines. Michael Douglas, recently fired, divorced, and subject to dementia, abandons his car in an L.A. traffic jam and starts walking "home" to an ex-wife who fears him. A plainclothes cop (Robert Duvall), who has helped push Douglas's car out of the way, gradually comes to realize that the disgusted motorist and a certain madman terrorizing half the city's population are one and the same man. We are switched back and forth from Douglas's progressively more violent encounters to Duvall (who has his own domestic problems) trying to track down Douglas. We know the two are bound to meet at the climax of the story with fatal results for either or both.

It's an obvious set-up but a perfectly valid one for a melodrama or a satire or a serious study of urban anomie. Unfortunately, Falling Down just slaps all three genres together into one phony mess.

Douglas's role is that of a walking time bomb and we are meant to share the fear of his ex-wife (Barbara Hershey) that he will wreak destruction on her and her child. But the film-makers don't want us to be completely distanced from him during his long trek home. So what is their solution? Do they take us so close to the character's thoughts and feelings that we empathize with and pity this man even as we cringe at his dangerousness? No. Taking the easy way out, Smith and Schumacher simply caricature everybody Douglas meets so that we cheer him on as he retaliates: an unrelievedly nasty Korean store owner; Latino punks played as the inhabitants of a paranoid WASP's nightmare; fast-food employees so smarmy and rude that we long for Douglas to wipe the tight little smiles off their fresh-scrubbed faces; pompous country-club golfers who refuse to let Douglas quietly walk over their green; street repairmen who don't even wait for our pedestrian to speak before they start verbally abusing him; a skinhead fascist, who not only manhandles Douglas but even hints that he might sodomize him before our lovable psycho is forced to blow him away. These aggressors aren't even valid representatives of the irritating people we may encounter during our own daily routines. They are just maniacs who apparently jumped out of bed that morning hellbent on giving poor Mike Douglas a hard time.

Each encounter contains something nasty and/or ludicrous that is beside, or goes beyond, the point of each episode. But one sequence is both particularly ugly and quite revelatory of the filmmakers' odiousness. When our hero waves a rifle at the terrified crowd of fast-food patrons, the close-ups of each customer, food dropping from the mouths of some, are calculated to make us laugh at the victims. Now we all know about the 1991 massacre at a restaurant called Lubby's of about a score of people by a madman armed to the teeth as Douglas is. In fact, I'll wager that that tragedy was one of the inspirations for this movie. But consider this: that real-life madman wasn't provoked by insolent service. He just entered and started slaughtering. And, as if to prove that even the most crazed of persons can't be pigeonholed too easily, he deliberately spared certain people at random even as he killed others. But Douglas first lectures the counter people on the worthlessness of the food they're serving and then walks about trying to put the patrons at their ease even as he terrifies them with the weaponry he's toting. How disgusting to evoke such a piteous real-life catastrophe just to score cheap satirical points, to turn Michael Douglas into a sort of Ralph Nader with an automatic.

But that brings us to the question, isn't Falling Down a satire and aren't Douglas's victims caricatured simply because they are created, in the spirit of satire, to be targets of scorn?

I do grant that the script shows a certain bent for mischief in scenes such as the one in which a little black boy is able to teach Douglas how to use a bazooka by having seen the weapon used so much on TV. But if the Douglas sequences are intended as satire, how could they exist in the same movie with the obviously nonsatirical scenes of detective Duvall conducting his investigation? A satirical vision of life is not something you can conveniently bifurcate within one story. Imagine Gulliver's Travels's satirical-fantasy episodes shuffled in with straightforward maritime adventures, or Animal Farm interrupted by a naturalist's descriptions of barnyard life. Dr. Strangelove was legitimately peopled by monsters because Stanley Kubrick had created a monstrous, perfectly stylized world for these grotesques to inhabit. Schumacher and Smith lack the talent or perhaps even the desire for such artistic unity.

Having exhilarated their audience with Douglas's vendetta against fools and knaves, the filmmakers then punish their protagonist for his violence. In the final encounter, Duvall so convinces Douglas that he's been a "bad guy" that the vigilante is willing to give up his life in expiation and despair. Thus, Falling Down, a rabble-rouser for ninety minutes, affirms its liberal-humanist credentials in the final reel. That may satisfy some viewers but I'll take an honestly Fascistic movie like Dirty Harry any day instead of this pseudoliberal hogwash.

The only redeeming features of this movie are the two lead performances and one supporting job. Duvall can't seem to make a wrong move. Like Henry Fonda and Peter Finch at their best, he achieves an art that conceals art. But he's not only natural, he's compelling. That he's magnetic when playing obsessives in Apocalypse Now or The Great Santini is fitting but not surprising. But that he can be amiably magnetic in Tender Mercies, The Seven Percent Solution, and this movie, is wonderful. Michael Douglas lacks Duvall's residual power. He must really work to deliver, but here he does deliver. This characterization is more admirably seen and felt by the actor than by the writer. Seeming stockier than usual in a white dress shirt, squinting behind nerdy glasses, holding his body upright with offended reasonableness, Douglas marches his character to his doom. In the one-scene role of the skinhead, Frederic Forrest gets under the viewer's skin by employing nails-against-the-blackboard mannerisms just far enough and not an inch further.

Oddly enough, in the supporting cast, all the important female players perform well below their usual level. As Duvall's shrewish spouse, Tuesday Weld, sadly encased in fat and screeching monotonously, repels. The usually vivid Barbara Hershey is dim as Douglas's ex. As a policewoman, Rachel Ticotin walks through her role as if she had been auditioning for her new TV series, "Crime and Punishment" (in which, by the way, she is very good).

So there you have it. Another "hot" American movie that is cleaning up at the box office because it tries to be all things to all people and, alas, succeeds.

RICHARD ALLEVA