FALLING

FALLING (2020) ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Director: Viggo Mortensen. Cast Viggo Mortensen, Lance Henriksen, Sverrir Gudnason, Laura Linney

Viggo Mortensen’s first directorial effort is a gentle, honest, empathic account of a relationship between a father and son. Vigo himself plays the “son”, revery restrained and willing to take a step back to let other star shine: in fact it’s veteran Lance Henriksen, who plays his dad, who is the real revelation here. 

The film feels a little bit like a pressure cooker: it bubbles and boils throughout the whole film and you know that sooner or later it’s going to explodes. However it does also become very repetitive: most of the scenes are slightly interchangeable and I didn’t feel there was any sense of real progression of emotions from A to B to C… it was just an agglomeration of scenes, some of them more obvious than others, some of them a bit cliché, but always done very tastefully and clearly with good intention.

Henriksen is losing his marbles and he’s got real anger inside. As he’s nearing his end, it gets harder and harder to like him and to see the person he might have once been: you get that in the first scene… and then again, and then again. At some point you do wonder whether the film is ever going to do something different. And actually it doesn’t. It just meanders about until it finally reaches a rather telegraphed “confrontation” before it goes back to meander a bit more and then it baffles the audience with a rather weird coda.

“Falling” is being released followed by a whole pointless controversy about Viggo Mortensen playing a gay character (something which he does very tastefully and respectfully. I’m so over this idiot debate about straight actors who shouldn’t play gay characters and all this political correctness… I mean, they are actors, from crying out loud!); but at least the controversy is making people notice the film, which would otherwise disappear, especially in a year where a masterpiece like “The Father” (still about an old man losing his memory) is being released…

Check here how you can watch this: https://www.modernfilms.com/falling