"SOCIETY'S TO BLAME": FALLING DOWN, NAKED
It does seem like Foster's scythe may first go from the left (minorities, construction workers who, in his view are wasting taxpayers' money rather than doing real work) to the right (the neo-Nazi, fat cats on a golf course) for no reason than to just make sure everyone is included. But when you feel like you're among the dregs, generally the people you lash out at are the ones who cross you. And while Foster may not always see this, we see it in scenes like the one where a man (Vondie-Curtis Hall) yells at a bank for not giving him a loan because he isn't "economically viable." We also see that when you're in the dregs, basically you go for the gut instinct, which is to blame an easy target, rather than think who the real culprits may be (none of who Foster strikes out at had anything to do with him losing his job, or striking fear into his wife). Prendergast, despite his problems, knows this, while Foster doesn't.
It takes great performances to keep this from falling into an exploitation movie, and Schumacher gets them. Douglas may be playing another angry white guy, as in BASIC INSTINCT, but there's more subtlety here. His is a tightly-wound, controlled performance that shows a man who's incredibly unaware of what he really is - when Prendergast finally confronts him at the end, Foster asks in disbelief, "I'm the bad guy? How did that happen?" Few actors today can play a regular guy without condescension as well as Duvall, and he's just as good here. Hershey doesn't have a big part, but it's a crucial one, and she makes us understand Foster's real problems. And Ticotin is reliable as Sandra. FALLING DOWN doesn't fall down at all, which is why it works so well.
A simplistic way of reading FALLING DOWN is a white man's rage against the Clinton society that cut him off, when in fact it might have happened before Clinton. NAKED is one man's rage against Thatcher and what followed in her wake, though it's more all-encompassing than that.
Johnny (David Thewlis) is the outcast here. An unemployed lout, he flees Manchester for London after a night of rough sex with a woman that could arguably be construed as rape. He looks up his old girlfriend Louise (Lesley Sharp), but as she happens to be out, her roommate Sophie (Katrin Cartlidge) invites him
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