review by Alex Hall

Director: Richard Dutcher
Title: Falling
Main Street Movie Company
2008
R-rated


I've been holding off recommending this film, because ai-ai-ai, will it make a Mormon audience composed of your typical Mormon culture uncomfortable. It is ridiculous how fully Dutcher has taken on the role of The Artist Who Challenges You. If Dutcher is going around touting in his advertisements that the thing is R-rated - one of *the* hot-button topics in Mormon culture - I cannot see otherwise but that he has taken it upon himself to challenge culture. If that gives you brownie points among crowds that think that's the mission of an artist (*ahem*AML-list*hem), okay. But I don't think there's any chart in heaven detailing how much any artist challenged culture. It's not about that.

According to Michael Medved - who has given Dutcher some of his best reviews! - the artist as cultural or religious challenger is a mythical role that has emerged only in this last century. Medved argues that most of the artists who created our "classics" through the centuries found plenty to do - under every kind of label or adjective you could conjure: disturbed, glorious, funny, tragic - whatever- without heckling their host culture, as so many artists in our day have been taught to believe they should. It is a point given in Dutcher's biography at his own web page that one of his teachers while in film school at BYU prophesied that the first great Mormon writer will be excommunicated. Richard, *that teacher was full of crap!* Without a mass of knowledge to back up my agreement with Medved, I only say that Medved's take on artists and culture sounds to me a whole lot better than advertising your film as "The first R-Rated Mormon film!" Why don't we just change the billboard to say "This film will shock and offend you!" What of the dopes in the narrative of this very film who claim the only way an artist will get ahead is by shocking and offending? We're supposed to think those guys are dopes, right? They're part of the culture that led to the lead character's
fall. So let's not listen to them.

Now I know I've gone and abrasively criticized marketing. Sometime last year I abrasively criticized a marketing effort coming from Dutcher's Main Street Movie Co. and shortly thereafter found a comment at my film blog from Dutcher's marketing guy, abrasively criticizing my (retrospectively) amateurish concept trailer. Tit-for-tat cannon blasts among the artists in Zion. I don't think it's easy for artists to separate the line of personal criticism from artistic criticism. And too often we merge them - but that's an essay for another day.

I believe Dutcher could have told the exact same story of FALLING with just slightly different directing decisions that wouldn't ensure he turns a lot of his audience away. And his marketing of this film is way off-base. (I know, I hear the cannons blasting still.) If you don't care about ratings (as I believe Dutcher claims not to), you don't advertise them. If many Mormons think it wrong to ever see an R-rated film (and that thinking is in error, in my opinion), period, that's fine for them - it is their right to risk missing out, and frankly, too many who argue against the point would seek to deny Mormons so inclined of that right, or deny them their freedom of conscience to avoid whatever they want - but the inevitable message behind "The first R-rated Mormon film!" is ironically as narrow in a different way. It actually seeks to drive the question of the appropriate to the utmost limits of tolerance - and I would argue that very approach will only produce intolerance - it isn't going to make anyone think. Nobody thinks when they feel threatened. All they think about is either raising their fists to pummel the hell out of you or getting the hell away from the situation (Dutcher has experienced far more than his share of both, on emotional terms). Fight or Flight. It reduces us to cavemen. Where's the love in that? Philosophical battles are one thing, but you've gotta know that *even though* there may not be a rational basis for Mormons to do so, they're simply going to read it as an attack on their religion.

Art isn't a culture or religion test. Life is a culture and religion test - the way we live. Art is a huge part of life (and for artists, it is literally the subsistence of their life - how they get by) - but as the Indigo Girls penned, "..there's just no medium for life". Life is life, art is story (where this film is concerned). And this story should be advertised for what it is - a very powerful morality tale - not for what it isn't (G-rated).

The unfortunate irony of that advertising is that the film is, in my opinion, powerfully Mormon, but while the advertising raises a question entirely irrelevant to the film, it only invites those whose minds are closed to the question - and I have tried opening many minds to the question, and the steel trap set on that question does not respond to crow bars - it only invites them to keep the trap shut, indeed the trap may only close tighter.

I had to decide whether I think Dutcher himself or his actors went against good principle in their performances. I've decided I don't think they did. The directing decisions over that question are so distracting it could not only tear down the proscenium for many (it nearly did for me, but I'd gone into the film with a lot of forethought and preparation) - it could make them want to burn down the theater. Nevertheless, to those willing to explore them, the questions are so gripping it may not matter. The context and the story, the presentation, the direction, what happens - it all very clearly paints the disturbances the film explores as just that: disturbances which are not wanted in a good life. The obvious implication is that we like good, not evil. Hallejuhah. One more film striking against evil.

This also may not be a film for the squeamish.

This film wallops the bloodthirsty with divine guilt.

Last of all, this film probes deeper into the mystery of the Atonement than any work of art I have encountered. If the story it presents is deeply disturbed, the power is in the questions the story poses of whether those disturbances could be overcome. The ending presents situations on questions of innocence and very powerful symbolic reversals - leading to Christ - which I found deeply affecting.