Falling (2021)

 Score: 3 / 5

Willis jolts awake on the plane, and we immediately know there will be some trouble. He's an old man, clearly being looked after by his middle-aged son John, and he seems confused. Lurching down the aisle, he grumbles curses and insults at the other passengers and shouts for his wife. John hurries after him, trying to hush him and get him to the washroom without too much disturbance. Though most of the passengers and flight crew watch, some with bewilderment and fear (rightfully so, these days) and some with knowing sympathy, none get up to help. They reach the washroom and Willis lights up immediately. His wife has been dead for years, and smoking hasn't been allowed on planes in many, many years. Willis is losing his mind.

It doesn't help matters that John, played by Viggo Mortensen doing his best work in a decade, is gay. A jet pilot who lives in sunny California with his husband and daughter, John has flown to his childhood home in New York to collect his aging father. It's a desperate move, one which challenges logic but hinges on our empathy, and we can't help but feel this plan is more than a little naïve. John plans to take Willis away from his isolation (and horses) and find him a new home on the west coast, where he can be closer to what family he has left. But dementia won't let Willis have a peaceful exit from life, nor will the demons now locked in his mind.

The relationship between father and son, we learn, has never been very good, even before John revealed his sexuality. The film runs along two plotlines, the present domestic drama and the past, as Willis grows increasingly violent and abusive to his family. The episodic scenes cut back and forth through time, especially when John's sister Sarah (Laura Linney, who always deserves more screen time) shows up with her kids; it is through her interactions with Willis that we learn the extent of his bigotry and cruelty to a family he has never known how to love. He explodes at random times, seethes at others, consistently and aggressively unpleasant for everyone to be around.

Sure, Willis doesn't understand how his son could be gay, but he also doesn't understand his grandkids dying their hair different colors or wearing new fashion styles. He spews vitriol and slurs at people of other races, even while in international-inspired restaurants. All women are whores to him, worthy of his disdain as well as his lust, perhaps most unabashedly the nurses caring for him in the hospital. Played by Lance Henriksen doing what I'm ready to call his best performance ever, Willis is the stuff of nightmares. While he's easy to hate -- profoundly easy -- there is a pitifulness to him not unlike that of King Lear; as the film drags on through harder and harder to watch venomous battles between characters, we recognize that his hatred isn't specifically about the people around him, but just directed at them. His rage is deeper, founded in the age when other old white men say America was great, and his operatic outcries are against the dying of the light; he is determined to not go gently into that good night.

John, on the other hand, is too much of a good guy, here. Endlessly kind and patient, he thoughtfully responds -- rather, often chooses not to respond -- while bending over backwards to care for his demented father. His character is less realistic than idealistic, but it should be remembered as a gold standard for how to handle situations like this. It helps that Mortensen, who by all accounts is as generous and soft-spoken in real life as many of the characters he's played, imbues John with so much unspoken pain that he doesn't need to verbalize his precarious and thankless position, as the caregiver in a less emotionally intelligent film would.

But this isn't The Judge or anything close to Still Alice in terms of sentiment. Despite its tendency to touch on hot-topic issues and deeply traumatic themes, the movie never leans into those impulses, choosing instead to let them pile up into an unspeakable elephant in the room. Which is true to life, to be sure; you can't hardly have ideological debates with people suffering from dementia, especially those in your own family. But dramatically, this hamstrings the film to the point that it pivots from being a relatively universal conceit to a grotesquely idiosyncratic chamber piece. And that would be fine, except that the characters are far too broadly written, too one-note and un-dynamic, to support a psychologically honest character study.

Then again, quite unusually for this subgenre, Mortensen (also acting as a first-time feature director here, which I don't think I mentioned previously) never asks us to see Willis as anything but a horrible man. Even though this makes for bleak viewing, I fully respect this as a storytelling choice because it puts the onus for kindness on John, yes, but also the viewers. We're challenged at every step to not yell at the old man, to turn off the movie and switch to nicer fare. We're forced to be patient and introspective in ways nobody is on social media. Like John, we can't just cast him out, ignore him, or "cancel" him because he's still here, a consequential force that is present and in vital need of attention.

The melodrama -- paired as it is with dark memories -- marches onward like a dirge toward its inevitable climax. As honest and inspired as many lines are, and they are, I was left feeling that I had looked into someone else's life rather than gained any wisdom, guidance, or insight into my own. I'm not sure what the purpose of loading this much sentiment into a movie is, if I'm left only wondering what I'd do in the given situation. Inevitably, when John unleashes his pent-up feelings about Willis, I found myself wondering why it took so long to get here, and what on earth conclusion could be remotely happy afterward. Spoiler alert: there is no happy resolution, but rather a cleverly fleshed-out denouement that matches the mother's metaphoric criticism of the father-son relationship earlier in a flashback scene. It's all very smart, but it's also a sorely taxing two hours to endure.