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Review: "Falling" (2008, dir. Richard Dutcher)

Falling is incredible, exhausting, brutal, devastating, and ultimately very rewarding, and it's one of the most powerful films I've ever seen--a deeply wounded cry caught on film (the opening scene, with Dutcher very literally cursing the heavens, is wrenching, and the film rarely lets up from the relentless anguish, anger, sadness, and searching those opening moments establish). It's an intense, immediate, and very personal drama that hurtles you into the mind of its central character and keeps you there for 82 minutes--and, if you're like me, leaves you thinking about it for days. It's a fascinating commentary on and dissection of the underbelly of L.A. film culture, and one of the most interesting films ever to examine the inherent voyeurism of cinema (right up there with Michael Powell's Peeping Tom and Hitchcock's Rear Window).

The film begins with Eric Boyle rushing into his home to find his wife hanging dead from the ceiling--and what could be nothing more than a cheap way of getting our attention is actually a beautiful, shattering scene, well shot and edited, and extremely well acted by Dutcher, whose performance in the film is extraordinary. A title, "3 Days Earlier," then appears. The story follows Boyle, an aspiring filmmaker living in L.A. who makes his money as a stringer--he's the first to appear at the scene of an accident with his videocamera, and he sells the footage to the local news stations, and the job is depicted as every bit as morally repulsive, degrading, and exploitative as it might sound: but then, is a down-on-his-luck would-be filmmaker qualified for anything else? We get the impression that both Eric and his wife, Davey, who is an aspiring actress, have lowered their standards as a survival instinct.

Eric--luckily or unluckily--happens to be in the wrong (or right) place at the right (or wrong) time, and he captures a grisly gang murder on tape. This sets in motion the two major driving factors that will take us through the rest of the film--Eric's personal spiritual crisis as he realizes the moral rock bottom he's hit, and goes about trying to find redemption (returning to his Mormon roots); it also creates problems for Eric, as the murderers seek out those responsible for exposing them and exacting their horrific vengeance.

It's not a perfect film--there are some snippets of dialogue that feel a bit forced in their conception and delivery, and there's a lack of development around the gangster characters (they are, essentially the Furies, and while their scenes are certainly effective, in thinking on the film later it seems that they don't quite occupy the same naturalistic realm as everything else). Still, what problems there are are minor compared to the overwhelming cinematic storm Dutcher unleashes--asking questions of faith that are hard to answer, making observations about the inherent structure of moviemaking that are inescapable, and offering a battering emotional experience that is utterly immersive. It is a film obsessed with and tormented by paradoxes. This may not be a perfect movie--but I'd take a real, honest, and intensely personal film like Falling over a dozen more perfect movies.