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You know how sometimes you come across those cupcakes that have about a foot of icing on top of about a quarter inch of cake, and, if you’re like me, the first thing you do is scrape all that topping off into the garbage in order to enjoy that little bit of more substantial stuff that’s left?
The Fallout is a little bit like that, with a great big pile of zeitgeist slathered over a neatly angled serving size of insight into our common human vulnerability
Streaming on HBO Max, this debut feature by writer and director Megan Park follows a teenager named Vada as she navigates the fallout of a deadly shooting at her high school.
Plunged into a kind of existential tailspin in the wake of the tragedy, Vada’s efforts to come to terms with what happened (and avoid coming to terms with it) offer an impressive and convincing portrayal of one person’s progress through the uneven terrain of grappling with trauma.
In terms of the aforementioned cupcake, she does, eventually, dig her way down to the nourishing, meaningful layers at the bottom of the mess her world has become, and this is what makes the film ultimately satisfying, and, I think, worth the watch.
But sensitive and impressionable viewers should be advised: there is a lot of icing in the meantime.
Pretty much from the film’s opening salvos, Vada gives many of the perennially less savory attitudes and laxities associated with teenagery an up-to-date iGen spin.
On the relatively neutral side, a lot of her most meaningful human interactions occur via the digital mediation of online platforms. And then she also curses freely, drinks underage, and experiments with same-sex erotic behaviour.
In the latter respects, she is certainly not an exemplary human being in any prescriptive sense. But she does seem to be pretty exemplary descriptively, that is, a pretty good stand-in for your average “go with the flow” citizen on the contemporary scene. As such, she presents a compelling image of how more or less anybody today might react amidst such psychologically trying circumstances.
Her moral errancy is not entirely flippant, in other words. Rather, in the film it is tied up with Vada’s individual attempts to cope with the real ramifications that disruptive violence not only has occurred already, but might, moreover, return again at any moment.
What she is grappling with, then, are some of the big, timeless questions faced by human beings in every time and place when running up against the limits of our knowledge, power of self-determination, and, ultimately, ability to preserve life itself. Despair and sex and alcohol are just some of the answers ventured, others among which include a great many of history’s religions, philosophies, and political initiatives.
Movie watchers whose tastes run in the line of tidy, squared away answers delivered direct to the doorstep of pre-sorted, inoffensive human lives will probably prefer to look elsewhere than The Fallout. I will say it again: this film comes served with a great glop of goop on top.
But those who are ready to dig elbow deep into a persuasive presentation of an untidy human life, may well find at its center the next best thing to clear cut answers, which is an ageless question honestly asked.