After the Fall
Saar Klein edited two films for Terrence Malick before directing his own, “After the Fall.” You might think, therefore, that a few Malickian touches would infect Klein’s debut film. Sprinkle approximations of the master director throughout “After the Fall” though he might, these attempts never spring organically from the material. The occasional narration and long, swirly glimpses at nature instead get hammered into a substandard “crime drama” that reeks of the Idiot Plot Syndrome.
Water is a common visual motif in “After the Fall,” as it is in Malick’s work, except here it is represented by that symbol of suburban privilege: the swimming pool. Ben Scanlon (Wes Bentley) installed it to raise property values on the New Mexico home he shares with his wife Susan (Vinessa Shaw) and kids. The camera imbues all manner of symbolism into this pool: First in dreamy shots of Ben and his kids’ naked limbs flailing about underwater; later in a sequence where Ben attempts to chlorine himself to death. The home improvement loan Ben took out for this watery deathtrap drives us toward crime and attempted suicide.
Ben goes to an insurance adjuster job every morning that he has been fired from but pretends not to have been fired from. He is never shown actively looking for a job once, nor does it ever cross his mind that anyone will notice he’s not going to his job every day anymore. Instead he looks up closed cases in hopes they will reopen themselves so he can solve them again and get paid for them more times or something like that. “You don’t even work here anymore!” exclaims Ben’s boss when Ben shows up with some useless new facts about some case or another after convincingly begging for his job back.
He thought everyone was honest; that’s why he lost his job investigating people. This could have led to some interesting places had it been explored but, you know. “After the Fall” wants us to believe that Ben is a bastion of self-righteous honesty, but remember: He’s been lying to his wife since the opening credits. All he had to do was tell her the truth and ask her to temporarily return to the workforce or borrow money from his snooty father in law; this movie would be over in 15 minutes. Instead, Ben has a Meet Cute with robbery, and it sends him down a suspense deprived path of criminality.
He gets the idea that he can support his family illegally when he walks in on a real estate agent’s illicit tryst in the house she’s showing; realtor and kept man immediately hand over their wallets (it helps that Ben has a gun for reasons too dopey to explain here); light bulb goes off over Ben’s head. Soon he is robbing convenience stores, gas stations and the car pound where the repo man took his car, none of which Susan notices even though they barely support the Scanlons’ accustomed lifestyle.
Ben is a thief who is not good at his job. He wears the thinnest stockings on his face so that anyone can recognize him through them, and he knows this. Ben also revisits crime scenes AND walks in front of mirrors and cameras before putting on pantyhose. Unfortunately for Klein’s script, his incompetence does not prevent him from committing crimes or give him an antagonist; a cop named Frank (Jason Isaacs) acts as both. Despite Frank being recognized by everyone except the audience, he ensures Ben is never prosecuted because he worked with Ben’s dirty cop dad at the precinct.
Frank feels like he was ported from another, grizzled movie but it must have been one where people have fun. He slams boilermakers while sitting alone at the local bowling alley. He approaches strange men and asks if they’d like free beer. Before meeting Ben, Frank has his own barely addressed side story: we see him sending a birthday card to his estranged son before breaking up a drunken bowling altercation amongst Ben’s friends.
Eventually, Frank tells Ben that he and Ben’s dirty cop of a Dad worked together at the precinct. “I knew who you were when I first saw you,” he tells our protagonist just another detail thrown in to explain why someone would befriend them in the first place.
There’s something kind of sick about how privileged “After the Fall” feels. It stacks the deck against its victims so that it can’t help but justify everything our anti-hero does. Every place he robs is staffed by someone poorer than him actually several someones; many of these employees are shown in a negative light pre-robbery and it almost seems as if they deserve it for existing rather than having jobs or spouses or anything else that would keep them safe from guys like Ben.
Eventually, all of this isn’t enough to prevent his crimes from being pawned off on an innocent man and “After the Fall” is too cowardly to follow this plot thread through to its logical conclusion. The sole nod to what they’ve done here is an “ambiguous” ending that isn’t as ambiguous as they think it is.
Since we know “After the Fall” will never let its anti-hero get in trouble, there’s absolutely no suspense during the robberies nor at home. When Susan finds out Ben has been fired, he does some kind of Jedi mind trick to get her to believe him instead of his employer. And when she finds the gun and stolen loot, she leaves with the kids but then inexplicably returns without question. She’s practically a Stepford Wife.
Klein goes berserk with the nods to Malick anyone who’s ever complained about Malick’s narration (and I’ve done so for “The Thin Red Line”, so I’m guilty) will think again after hearing some of this junk. The closing credits of “After the Fall” feature a thank you credit for Terrence Malick; it should have been an apology.
Watch After the Fall For Free On Solarmovies.