Film Review: FALLING (2020): Home is Where the Hate is

Falling Review

Falling (2020) Film Review, a movie directed by Viggo Mortensen starring Viggo Mortensen, Lance Henriksen, Sverrir Gudnason, Laura Linney, Hannah Gross, Terry Chen.

I can still remember the first time my uncle verbally abused me. My grandma had just died, and my brother and I went home with him after the funeral. We were tidying up the living room when he pulled up in his truck. And when he found out we had thrown out some rotten bananas, he exploded, screaming about how he was ashamed to have us as nephews. This was the beginning of a long decline in our relationship, as my uncle — a big hearted but emotionally scarred man — couldn’t cope with yet another in a seemingly endless string of personal losses and parental abandonment. Without having this strained relationship with my uncle, I don’t think I would have been able to relate to the central conflict of Viggo Mortensen’s Falling.

Falling is a story about estrangement. Mortensen plays John, a gay man from Los Angeles who has to bring his conservative father Willis, played by Lance Henriksen, to live with him, as he’s become too old to live on his own anymore. Willis is angry, suffers from dementia, and emotionally abuses his son for being a “f*g” and a “fairy,” while John has no other choice than to put up with it. After decades of mistreatment, he’s learned to avoid rising to the bait, but it leaves him frustrated and exhausted. It soon becomes clear that Willis is incapable of adjusting to his new surroundings, as he bemoans living in liberal California and makes petty swipes at John’s husband Eric (Terry Chen) and their ability to raise their young daughter Monica (Gabby Velis). To make matters worse, Willis keeps absentmindedly wandering off wherever they go together, frightening John and further straining their relationship.

The film resonates with me because I can emphasize with the struggle of Mortensen’s character taking care of his ailing and emotionally disturbed father. While I don’t have that kind of problem with my dad, I have had to take care of my elders before only to be repaid with resentment and verbal abuse. And when that person has nowhere else to go and can’t take care of themselves, it creates an impossible situation where you are repeatedly hurt by someone you love and who loves you. You can’t allow yourself to be harassed this way, but you can’t walk away either, because the person you love will die. This is the intractable struggle that characterizes Falling and what makes it so meaningful for me personally.

Like Mortensen’s character, you try and try albeit without his saint-like patience. You bottle your resentments up. You plead and pander. And once in a while your abuser has a moment of lucidity where you can relate like normal human beings. And you hope it can last. But it never does, not with the senile, the emotionally stunted, and the mentally ill. It’s a weight you have to carry as long as you live. That profound estrangement sticks with you.

While you might expect John and his father to work towards a simple reconciliation, the end is anything but. As Mortensen said in a recent interview with Variety, “I didn’t want people to tell me what was going on; I wanted [them] to talk about it and think about it.” In fact, I’m not sure what to make of certain parts myself, especially the final minute of the film, which lingers on a mysteriously ethereal note. Less important than whether John and his father make up in the end is what Falling can teach you about real life relationships, that personal estrangement is a fact of life and that sometimes the best we can do is learn to take it in stride.

Rating: 6/10

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