Review of “Falling”: A Dark Family Drama from Viggo Mortensen’s Directorial Debut

Control is the term that springs to mind while discussing Viggo Mortensen’s feature film debut, “Falling.”

The actor, poet, artist, and musician who last appeared at Sundance in a role that would have garnered him an Oscar nomination for “Captain Fantastic” (written and directed by him) has skillfully managed a drama about memory, forgiveness, and ageing with “Falling.” Fundamentally, it consists of two individuals, one who is wildly trying to take charge of his own life and the other who is anything but.

The movie, which debuted on Friday at the Sundance Film Festival with its first press and industry showing, is a quiet, contained drama until its characters blow out. Though the film’s technique is understated, the emotions it examines are not.

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Famous for his parts in the “Alien” films and “Millennium,” Lance Henriksen portrays Willis, an elderly man who has been intolerant and uncontrollable his entire life. He is battling a dementia that only makes his already challenging personality worse by increasing his levels of frenzy and randomness.

As he moves his father from a remote New York farm to Los Angeles, where Willis can be among the families of both of his children, John and Sarah (Laura Linney), John (played by Mortensen) tries to put decades’ worth of painful memories behind him.

“California is for c—suckers and flag-burners,” Willis declares sharply as he uneasy moves into his new home with John, John’s husband Eric (Terry Chen), and their daughter Monica (Gabby Velis). Willis and L.A. are not a good match. However, John makes an effort to ignore the jeers and homophobic remarks and maintain his composure in the face of the man who has been bothering him his entire life.

The video is a complex work of art, flitting between different periods of time and the vanishing recollections of a man who was, more often than not, a jerk with his mouth full of cigarettes and his fist full of beer. A guy obsessed by rage and uninterested in undoing the harm he committed to his family is someone Henriksen occasionally finds endearing, but his terrifying performance is one fashioned in darkness.

As a director, Mortensen doesn’t have an easy time: we expect a movie like this to have a happy ending, yet Willis appears to be beyond redemption for a significant portion of the movie.

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However, Mortensen is too astute to pursue a simple resolution; instead, he delves into nuances of acceptance and resignation, especially following a fight that could pass for a father-son rendition of the scene from “Marriage Story”—it’s raw and terrifying, reaching so low that all the characters can do in the aftermath is try to scrounge themselves out of the rubble.

John accuses his father at one point of never having expressed regret for whatever he has done, but as viewers, we know that is untrue: “I’m sorry I brought you In the first scene of the film, Willis, played by Sverrir Gudnason in flashbacks, stares at his young son and says, “I came into the world so you could die.”

While the movie rejects this fatalism, it also doesn’t act as though these characters can ever truly escape it. As one might anticipate from much of Mortensen’s acting career, “Falling” is a deftly rendered character drama that pays attention to the little nuances that really make these characters come to life.

Following the loss of his mother, Mortensen started thinking back on childhood events and used those recollections as a loose inspiration for the fictional scenarios he developed for the movie. Although the first card in the end credits is addressed to “Charles and Walter Mortensen,” it’s easy to deduce that Viggo Mortensen is the true recipient.