Los Angeles. 50-year-old Bill Foster (Michael Douglas), who has just been dumped from a defense contractor dependent on the US Department of Defense, suffers from a borderline personality disorder which, after separating from his wife, forced him to return to his mother (Lois Smith). Elisabeth (Barbara Hershey) also cost him a restraining order that prevents him from getting close to his young daughter Adele (Joey Hope Singer). His uneasiness explodes on the hot morning of his birthday when, after getting stuck in a crazy traffic jam on the freeway, he abandons his car (licensed D-FENS) to the ire of the other motorists involved, including the senior LAPD sergeant, Martin Prendergast (Robert Duvall), who hoped to spend his last hours of service differently before retiring.
From that moment on, Foster’s day becomes a personal descent into hell, paralleled by an unstoppable and paroxysmal escalation of madness and violence: as Bill first destroys a convenience store run by a Korean, after having, for vain reasons (the price of a can Lemonade) was questioned), then beats up two Hispanic thugs after invading their neighborhood, then persistently calls his ex-wife to get his young daughter a gift at any cost despite the disciplinary action against him. From that moment, after other manifestations of rabid aggression, “D-FENS” falls into the crosshairs of Prendergast and his young colleague Sandra Torres (Rachel Ticotin): and will end up killing a neo-Nazi fanatic (Frederic Forrest) in cold blood. Owner of a military clothing store after destroying Adele’s gift after a furious ideological row. Passing its point of no return with no possibility of salvation or redemption.
Released in American cinemas on February 26, 1993 and invited (too audaciously) to compete at the Cannes Film Festival a few months later, Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down was a very successful film (even here, where it was released immediately after its presentation on the Croisette), although its intrinsic qualities are a far cry from those of Hollywood auteur cinema, which some were willing to acknowledge at the time. Played by a top-notch cast (Douglas was at the peak of his career, after Fatal Attraction, Wall Street, The War of the Roses, and Basic Instinct, and you can’t think of another actor contemporary in the role ; Duvall already a sacred monster), was based on a screenplay (by Ebbe Roe Smith) that deliberately balanced between an overtly grotesque register and a desire to photograph the social and private tensions of America that would soon be “Clintoniana,” but further which the management of George Bush Sr. still weighed and it is a film that is perhaps rightly forgotten today, but which despite everything remains a clear example of the timeless trash of the most hysterical and in its own way unrepeatable mainstream cinema that marked all the eighties and that perhaps would have continued if they was not definitively swept away by Quentin Tarantino (“Pulp Fiction” is from 1994) and above all by his numerous and uneven followers.
However, if we look closely, as the famous critic Roger Ebert rightly observed at the time, the deepest roots of “A Day of Ordinary Madness” lie even in the past decade, specifically in Sidney Lumet’s “Fifth Estate” ( Network, 1976): where deranged presenter Howard Beale yells, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” he admonished his viewers to rebel against an order of things that had gotten out of hand massively at the expense of the so-called “average citizen”. In the era of the great US recession, Schumacher’s film was to the early 1990s what Lumet’s (also rhetorical) film was to the post-Watergate era: a tool to explore the nation’s comatose state following the Nixon presidency and first to be assessed by Ford and then carried by Carter in a change similar to that promised by Clinton, and hence the pantography of a “sickness of the mind” reflecting all those reasons why that change was actually necessary and desirable.
In the hands of a less (lovingly) crude director, “A day of ordinary madness” and its hero Bill Foster/D-FENS would probably have become the paradoxical, ideologically short-circuited paradigm of a certainly “false” (anti-)heroism, but somehow “necessary” Measure. Finally, what was staged between the lines was also the epilogue of three consecutive Republican terms and their heavy social legacy: economic inequality, fear of others, fascist resurgence, unemployment and capitalist dissolution of the same work ethic; as well as the blurring of the lines between “reactionary” ideology and plain lust for revenge (as demonstrated very well by the “theoretical” dispute between the shop’s neo-Nazi and Foster, who, while acting “in opposition”, disapproves of the perversely hateful mindset of man). But that mockingly cathartic, para-Eastwood dimension the film could have aspired to is gradually replaced by a more cartoonish (and villainous) “daytime” declension of Bronson’s rage (read “Night’s Hangman”) that comes with the more “natural” but none of the solutions.
Because the film at first almost asks to side with the crazy Everyman who reacts to an equally out-of-control jungle world, but then almost makes us wrong or ashamed when the protagonist’s inevitable self-destruction is still mollified by one perhaps superior justice, but once again taking the form of a vigilante, albeit wearily and at times reluctantly. It is difficult to say which viewers of that time might want to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the film with a review today, but also to understand what interest the “young” people who approach it for the first time might have: despite everything , it might not be a waste of time for either of you.