Falling

If the character in therapy is your thing, you might enjoy this. It does have all those therapeutic phases. The protagonist keeps a lid on it at first, then logically it explodes (actors act), and in that exhaustion he finds reconciliation. Otherwise, the film has problems to the roof. You know those mods in current video games where you can decrease or morbidly increase facial expressions in characters? So for most of the movie I felt like some actors (Henriksen, Linney) had it turned up to 250% while others had it turned down to 30%. Lance yells, bullies, slurs, screws around, and everyone else around him just kind of exhales. This prompts the read that actually the fault lies with the protagonist who never took his father properly in hand and grandly left for a better life, which sounds arrogant on my part, but that ties into the second problem, which is that the film doesn't give any hint of the background and era that this father actually comes from, so instead of some local, period value framework that would allow us to work with the character, it just offers us a sadistic psychopath, interspersed with two or three scenes where he doesn't exactly tyrannize his family to show that the sky wasn't always just cloudy. But then the film loses the possibility of closure, allowing a final reconciliation to this terrorizing scumbag, even though we don't actually know what he's reconciling with. And I know what Mortensen was going for here, and it seems nice, but he wasn't able to film it in a way that made it readable. Why I'm leaving this otherwise poorly made film with an average score is the kind of appealing production trickery that brought this film into the world and that reminds me of the stories from old small productions. How Viggo and his brother used their second citizenship to secure co-producers, the director took the lead role so that according to the actors unions they could get money which they then transferred to the production accounts and put back into the film, etc. And of course the chronoscopy was a delight. PS: oh, and Mortensen isn't gay, which strikes me as a cop-out in the context of this film, because he's just using the homosexuality thing as hyperbole. Shame, shame.  PPS: Terry Chen's performance here is so awful that he reminded me of the character Seraph from the Matrix sequels, if he'd lost the Oracle somewhere and spent the whole time pretending everything was fine and hoping no one would ask about her. (02.06.2021)

Viggo Mortensen's directorial debut has a compelling premise, but its power is somewhat dissipated in a rather shallow execution. In terms of acting, it's a quality piece (perhaps only Laura Linney over/underacted a bit), and I was intrigued by its retrospective narrative, yet I felt it lacked stronger emotions to move me while watching. (07.06.2021)