Taking the Fall (2021)
What’s Your Excuse?
“Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.” —G. Michael Hopf
Tyler (Munro Chambers) is a twenty-eight-year-old aspiring graphic designer who has just been released from prison. He did six years for hosting a party in which he and his pals tried to “smoke out” a house with twenty pounds of weed. His best friend, Justin (Roland Buck III), picks him up a few blocks from the corrections facility and takes him to an Airbnb (or “share pad”) for a low-key evening of soaking up freedom.
Unbeknownst to Tyler, Justin’s secret plan to invite a couple of additional friends turns into a full-blown dinner party whose guest list includes Tyler’s ex-girlfriend; her asshole new fiancee; and the buddy for whom Tyler took the fall, thus wrecking his mid-twenties.
When screenwriter Steve Hellmann and director Josh Marble set out to make Taking the Fall, there’s no way they could have known their story would take on an entirely different meaning upon release. This millennial-malaise drama would have been plenty resonant before the pandemic, but in our newish world of tanked economies, evaporating non-essential work, and even greater distrust of corporate power structures and social safety nets, the film not only serves as an optimistic roadmap for a lost generation; it shines as an essential reminder of youth’s possibilities and responsibilities.
You could dismiss Taking the Fall as a smug, hundred-minute finger-wag by self-satisfied boomers who don’t know what the hell their ungrateful kids are complaining about. But the film was made by members of its target demographic, meaning it’s much harder to ignore.
Interacting with various clusters of his friend group, Tyler becomes increasingly annoyed at everyone’s complaints. Ex-GF Kate (Katie Gill) feels stuck in a corporate job that leaves her no time to pursue her passion for photography. She’s also engaged to an unemployed, arrogant dudebro named Zachary* (Jonathan Dylan King), who needles people for fun. Another friend, Allison (Avalon Penrose) is a single mom who still wants to live the single life (she brought her five-year-old daughter to the party; in a later scene, mommy is falling down drunk while little Selena watches videos on her iPad).
Then there’s Peter (Chris Sturgeon), a whipped sadsack whose high-maintenance girlfriend, Michelle (Kristin Zimber), is also his boss’s daughter. Six years earlier, when it came time for Peter to own up to the fact that he’d orchestrated the smoke-out party, he chickened out. Tyler went up the river so his friend (all his friends, really) could live their lives.
Turns out, that might have been a huge mistake. In fairness to the party guests, Tyler mounts a pretty tall soapbox (more like a case of Jim Beam, really) to chastise everyone for having wasted so much time not pursuing their dreams. “You were too afraid to fail,” he tells them. “Life could be so much worse,” he warns, launching into a diatribe about the suspended animation of hard time. His self-righteousness feels justified but comes off a bit harsh—especially since it’s entirely possible that he, too, could have been boxed in by life’s incremental post-college setbacks, doubts, and comforts.
In another unintentional COVID-era parallel, Tyler finds himself unable to leave the house, trapped not by a virus but by curiosity and the communicable disease of social propriety. Who are these selfie-obsessed pod people wearing the skin of his friends, he wonders? At dinner, Justin pulls Tyler away from the table and no one notices: they’re blankly glued to their phones like NPCs awaiting a software update.
Only Justin seems to have made something of himself after college, and one of Taking the Fall’s great joys is watching his and Tyler’s friendship rekindle after so many years apart. Munro and Buck have an utterly believable, fluid chemistry that made me wish their fictitious characters had their own Reality TV show about millennial go-getters.
So much youth-targeted entertainment is obsessed with debt, inequity, corruption, and the myriad other factors that supposedly keep teens, twenty-somethings (and even thirty-somethings) from the higher quality of life that they imagine their forebears enjoyed. With Taking the Fall, creators Hellmann and Marble posit that life is tough all around, but an individual’s attitude in the face of adversity is the greatest determining factor in whether or not the road will be rocky but navigable—or a bombed-out, impassable mess.
More to the point, they focus their attention on a group of extremely privileged individuals who can’t see their own potential through all the whining. But their message (as espoused through Tyler) is not one of disdain but of concern and love. He’s the conscience of a group who has spent so long without one that they resent the slightest nudge toward the noble path. “You’re like Batman,” Justin tells Tyler, “[Gotham’s citizens] need him, but they take him for granted.”
Though the COVID era is (hopefully) drawing to a close, a host of seemingly new and insurmountable challenges awaits everyone. Job loss, long-term health issues, political strife, social unrest, shifting economies; we’ll have to find a way through this obstacle course together—just as every human being in every era of every civilization has had to do since time began. The ones who succeed won’t necessarily be superheroes, super-geniuses, or super-wealthy.
Many will be those who simply understand that the key to the cell is burning a hole in their back pocket.
*Not “Zach”…Zachary.
