Falling: Viggo Mortensen’s Triple-Threat Family Drama Just Too Raw to Handle
By Karen Gordon
Rating: C
Actor Viggo Mortensen makes his directorial debut with Falling, a story about a son wrangling with his difficult, elderly father who is slipping into dementia. It’s a heartfelt film that seems to be aimed at the strength of familiar love in spite of difficulties. The elements are all there, but the film’s repetitive structures render it frustratingly flat.
Mortensen plays John Peterson, son of Willis, played in the present by Lance Henriksen, and in flashbacks by Swedish actor Sverrir Gudnason. John lives in California with his husband Eric (Terry Chen) and their daughter Mönica (Toronto actress Gabby Velis, who is not the only Torontonian in the cast; director David Cronenberg has a cameo).
As the film begins, John is bringing his father back with him to California. Willis, now a widower still living on the farm where John and his sister Sarah (Laura Linney) spent their early childhood, has ostensibly wanted to relocate to be close to his children and grandchildren.
Willis doesn’t remember this or why he’s come to California, and John’s explanation is met with a stream of abuse. Willis is difficult and almost relentlessly abusive, a master of taunts and low blows who is a racist, says awful and homophobic things to his son, and is rude to Eric.
He’s also crude, given to talk at length about bowel movements, peeing the bed. Whether this is part of his nature or part of the way dementia is affecting him isn’t clear. In a series of flashbacks, we see Willis transform into an abusive and mean-spirited man, causing the breakdown of his marriage, and conflict with John. But we also see moments of great tenderness and understanding between the two.
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Back in the present, the only relief any of us get from Willis’s raging is when he talks to his granddaughter, whom he clearly loves and, other than the sometimes-off-colour conversations, treats with great affection, which she returns. John, on the other hand, endures his father’s endless abusiveness with a gentle patience and maturity that seems to characterize his personality. It takes a long time for that patience to run out, but the love — or sense of duty — remains steady.
As a director Mortensen (who also wrote the script) has a nice eye and does a good job of evoking a sense of time and place. The idea of building the relationship through flashbacks is a good one, but the technique is used so often in this film that it slows things down and feels repetitive.
Falling is in part about the bond between parents and children, and the love that is built over a lifetime that sometimes can’t be easily understood or reconciled but is made more complicated when a parent becomes fragile and ill.
Henriksen is terrific as the abusive elder Willis. I couldn’t wait to get away from him.
And that’s one of the bigger problems with the film. His constant repulsive behaviour dominates and overwhelms the story, and makes it feel very one-note.
Falling. Directed and written by Viggo Mortensen. Starring Viggo Mortensen, Lance Henriksen, Laura Linney, Terry Chen, Gabby Velis, and David Cronenberg. In select theatres and on Apple TV app, VOD platforms, and TIFF Bell Lightbox Digital starting February 5.