There are plenty of worthy movies out there, and there are plenty that fit comfortably in the “enjoyable crap” category. But more and more, I find myself appreciating movies that fail — often in a big way — but have something important going for them. These are not truly great movies, with a minor flaw in them. They are fundamentally flawed, but somewhere within them there is a germ of a good idea, or just one fine scene, one performance, one moment that rescues it from obscurity and makes it compelling. There was an earlier thread of movies we are ashamed we had not watched or had not enjoyed. Here is a category of movie to be ashamed that one liked, but to still see something worthwhile in the whole enterprise.
So my first candidate is Falling Down, with Michael Douglas, Robert Duvall, Tuesday Weld, and Frederic Forrest. It’s a crude vigilante movie that asks us to applaud a domestic terrorist, that tugs shamelessly at our heartstrings, that gives us explosions as well as a child’s tears, that caricatures the people “D-Fens” kills (or causes to die). Worthless. Exploitative. And yet… I just watched it again on HBO and it captures something about middle class alienation that we rarely see. There are a handful of scenes that, for me, rescue the movie. The Douglas character sitting in traffic at the beginning (the heat and insect buzzing remind me of the train station scene in Once Upon A Time in America), the black character holding up the handwritten sign saying he is “not economically viable”, Douglas watching home movies of his ex-wife and child and seeing his own anger and the fear in their faces, Duvall’s early tender scenes on the phone with Weld. There are too many wrong decisions to make it a decent movie, but enough good ones to make it memorable.