Viggo Mortensen (2020)

Some people experiencing a friend or relative with dementia are appalled by the dismantling and disappearance of the person they loved.  Others find that, as layers of identity are eroded, the core personality persists and is intensified.  The dementee in Falling – the first film Viggo Mortensen has directed, and which he also wrote and stars in – is decidedly in the second category.   Willis Peterson is a vicious old bastard.  A plethora of flashbacks makes clear he was once a vicious young bastard, too.

The elderly Willis (Lance Henriksen), a farmer in the Midwest, travels to California to stay with his middle-aged son John (Mortensen), an airline pilot, who lives with his Chinese-American doctor husband Eric (Terry Chen) and their adopted daughter Monica (Gabby Velis).  John has it in mind to find Willis sheltered housing in the vicinity but the old man vehemently rejects the idea, which is quickly abandoned.  In what seems to be a matter of days, he’s been examined by a proctologist (a cameo from David Cronenberg), received cancer surgery and gone back to his farm, where John tries and fails to wean his father onto a healthier diet, and to keep his own temper.  After his son’s return home (it’s not clear how long after), Willis collapses in the farmyard, in the snow.  His old mare comes sniffing round him.  He curses her – ‘fat old bitch’ – and dies.

In the wake of the horrification of Alzheimer’s in Natalie Erika James’s Relic, the set-up and surface realism of Falling look to announce a return to a more familiar dramatic treatment of a senior citizen losing their marbles.  Like James, Mortensen has reportedly drawn on personal experience to make the film (dedicated to ‘Charles and Walter Mortensen’) but Willis’s dementia is strikingly intermittent.  In the opening scene, he’s violently disoriented on the plane flight to California.  Once they’ve landed, John briefly leaves his father in the arrivals lounge; when he returns, Willis has gone, having left the airport and taken a taxi to John’s house independently.  There’s one further episode when Willis wanders off (to enjoy one of those solo seashore idylls movie geriatrics are prone to) and the police bring him back.  Otherwise, Willis is forgetful – and characteristically angry when told he’s being forgetful – but, much more conspicuously, a racist, a homophobe and a (perennially horny) misogynist.

Willis’s dying words to his mare are pretty typical of his turn of phrase talking to or about women.  He derides his son’s homosexuality, and John’s life partner, as a non-white gay, gives Willis scope to be doubly offensive.  He keeps referring to Eric as John’s boyfriend rather than husband but you sense – and John certainly thinks – this is designed to rile rather than an expression of amnesia.  Willis’s talent to abuse may also explain why he consistently confuses his long-time, recently deceased partner Jill with his ex-wife Gwen, the mother of his children.  This habit, too, is more vexing to John and his sister Sarah (Laura Linney) than a source of bafflement or frustration for their father.  In any case, Willis’s world view effectively limits his capacity for mixing people up:  as John says, he regards nearly everyone alive as ‘whores, assholes and fags’.

What feels like half the film is devoted to scenes from John’s childhood and adolescence, in which he’s played by three different actors, at the ages of five, ten and fifteen (Grady McKenzie, Etienne Kellici and William Healy respectively).   Before any of these, he appears as a newborn baby, brought home from hospital by Gwen (Hannah Gross) and the young Willis (Sverrir Gudnason), whose attitude to John is remarkably negative even in this opening scene.  Sarah, the younger child, has two incarnations (Carina Battrick as a five-year-old, Ava Kozelj a few years later).  Willis is always more kindly disposed to his daughter than his son but his abusive behaviour ends his and Gwen’s marriage when Sarah is still an infant.  Gwen moves out with the children, though they continue to have regular contact with Willis and Jill (Bracken Burns).

The strongest episode in Falling comes in an early flashback.  Willis goes out to shoot wild duck, takes his little son with him, and hands his gun to the child to let him have a go.  With his very first shot, John brings a duck down into a lake, dashing excitedly into the water to retrieve his trophy.  His father is delighted and his mother, when the hunters return home, startled by what’s happened.  John insists on putting the dead duck in his bath that night, presumably instead of the rubber version he’s used to.  He wakes next morning to find his mother plucking the bird before cooking it.  He insists it’s his job to remove the feathers, and Gwen shows him how.  These scenes nicely illustrate John’s unaccustomed delight in pleasing his bluntly macho father without spoiling the happy relationship he enjoys with his watchful, protective mother.  The next time we see him and Willis hunting together, ten years have passed, the father’s in the habit of telling his long-haired son he looks like a girl, and their quarry is a deer.  This time, needless to say, John can’t pull the trigger.  Willis eyes him with disgusted disappointment.  (The Deer Hunter‘s psychologically before-and-after deerstalking sequences have a lot – of imitators – to answer for.)

Sverrir Gudnason gave a good performance as Björn Borg in Janus Metz’s Borg vs McEnroe (2017) and, with a better script than the one Viggo Mortensen has written, would likely have done the same in Falling.  As in Metz’s film, Gudnason (now turned forty) is easily convincing as a much younger man.  He gives some emotional mobility to the early scenes:  we can believe Gwen finds her husband attractive as well as problematic.  Otherwise, there’s a dismal lack of contrast between Willis past and present.  Mortensen merely uses the one to confirm the evidence of the other, and vice versa.  He gives no hint as to what’s made Willis the nasty piece of work he is – and even his slivers of niceness are repetitious.  Four or five decades ago, only little Sarah could raise a smile from Willis; nowadays, he’s close to grandfatherly to Monica, while continuously insulting Sarah’s teenage daughter and son (Ella Jonas Farlinger and Piers Bijvoet), when they come with their mother for a family lunch – though neither kid is fazed by the onslaught.

I must have seen Lance Henriksen, a long-serving character actor, before but I didn’t recognise him.  Henriksen has a bigger role in Falling than he’s used to, and plays it forcefully, but Willis’s splenetic rants, since there’s no exploration of his background or personality, are inevitably monotonous.  Mortensen makes matters worse (more shallow) by presenting everyone else as purely nice and trying vainly to please.  Despite his exasperation, John (whom Mortensen plays well) is responsible and compassionate.  Sarah’s diplomatic efforts tie her in knots and reduce her to tears.  Willis would try the patience of a saint, which is just what Eric shows.

It hardly improves the film but comes as something of a relief that the action takes place in the aftermath of the 2008 US presidential election rather than eight years later.  There’s an Obama poster in John and Eric’s home, and Willis derides his son for voting for ‘that Negro’; at least the old man’s ‘hero’ is John McCain rather than Trump.  Mortensen’s plotting is ropy, however, especially the high-speed cancer treatment.  In a scene where John argues with Willis while the latter is watching a western on television the TV screen shows John Wayne vs Montgomery Clift in Red River, a too obviously apt choice.  Perhaps the phoniest moment of all comes after the climactic argument between father and son.  It leads – as this kind of screen showdown so often leads – to a tentative mutual understanding.  We don’t see the rapprochement collapse, the old man’s dementia notwithstanding.  By now, it’s the writer-director, rather than Willis, who seems to be suffering memory loss.

29 November 2020