Losing It All in L.A.

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

TITLE: FALLING DOWN

DIRECTOR: JOEL SCHUMACHER

WRITER: EBBE ROE SMITH

THE BOTTOM LINE: An unlikely Tarzan of the urban jungle feeds on, and feeds, our worst fears about city life.

It's hard to know how to respond to Falling Down: deplore its crudeness or admire its shrewdness. But it is occasionally the movies' job to plunge into the national psyche, root around in its chaotic darkness and return to the surface with some arresting fantasy that helps bring our uglier imaginings into focus. In that sense, this often vulgar and exploitative movie has some value.

It begins in a place we've all been -- a hopeless traffic jam -- and it proposes a solution most of us have entertained: dump the damn car and proceed on foot. Of course, most people think twice. But the figure played by Michael Douglas, and identified (from his customized license plate) only as D-FENS, is not at the moment into mature reflection. Recently separated from his job and his wife, he's a bundle of hot-wired nerves. And today is his young daughter's birthday. He has not been invited to the party, but he means to crash it.

When he steps out of that automobile and heads for his sometime home far across Los Angeles, D-FENS steps into a contemporary urban nightmare. It's all here: panhandlers and drive-by shootings, a terrorized fast-food restaurant, even a neo-Nazi skinhead spewing hate. In effect, director Joel Schumacher is re-creating, quite artfully, all the horrific images on the 11 o'clock news. And it is impossible to distance yourself from these pictures the way you can when they are surrounded by weather and sports.

Much the same thing happens with D-FENS, whose portrayal by Douglas is more finely tuned than Ebbe Roe Smith's script. When we meet him he is a sort of Everygeek -- flattop haircut, half horn-rims, a pocket protector fully armed with ball-points. You expect his anger to be ineffectual, especially since he starts out armed only with paranoid righteousness. But, as we all know, weaponry is easily acquired in the jungle of our cities, and by the time D- FENS nears home, he has acquired a bazooka. More important, he is no longer the nightmare's victim, but rather its logical extension and principal ogre, the guy the neighbors always describe as "quiet" or "well behaved," after his shooting spree is over.

Falling Down attempts to balance his imbalance with the presence of a cop named Prendergast (Robert Duvall). He, too, is something of a loser, due to retire prematurely from the force at the end of the day. But he has the qualities everyone needs to survive in the city these days -- good humor, patience, some compassion. These, however, are quiet virtues, and even though they are expertly embodied by Duvall, they are passive. They are not, at least, cinematic virtues. He can't really compete for the camera's attention. Or ours. When the film is over, it's hard to remember him.

For, let's face it, there is an element of truth in the character of D-FENS. But it is, finally, tabloid truth. His motives and psychology are not, to say the least, subtly set forth. The menaces lurking in the city he traverses are exaggerated. And the people who drive him over the edge are all racially or socially stereotypical, the broadly drawn "others" imagined by the uninformed middle class, quaking behind the walls of their gated communities, talking at cocktail parties about buying guns and insisting -- not entirely persuasively -- that they wouldn't be afraid to use them. To the degree that Falling Down encourages this mind-set, it is a dangerous and morally stupid movie.