This is a really hard movie to pull off. In terms of the gut reaction test, the climax of the film is 15 minutes in. That’s when the stakes are highest and most immediate. I felt the school shooting scene in the bathroom viscerally. The teasers for the film use that scene and it’s every bit as effective as the American Sniper trailer. Once that’s done, where does the movie go from there? Everything after is going to be tamer and subtler. That’s hard. Flight never matches the intensity of the plane crash at the beginning. 22-July turns into a dull procedural. Occasionally, a movie like Room figures it out, but that’s more the exception than the rule.
In that respect, I’d call The Fallout mostly a success. After the school shooting scene, I never got bored with the movie. A lot of that has to do with Jenna Ortega. She’s really great in this. It’s a standard quippy teen role. She thinks she’s wise beyond her years, but these events reveal that her emotional intelligence is right on schedule. Her reaction to everything isn’t great, because no one is prepared for something like that to happen. I love all the inconsistencies and confusions in her reactions. She bonds with Maddie Ziegler’s character since that’s who she happened to share this traumatic moment with. Ortega doesn’t rebel from her family as much as she doesn’t know how to handle them. What does helping Ortega even look like? Give her space or be there for her? Keep her distracted or tackle it head on? Each person is different and we don’t really know how we’d react.
My only issue with the movie is that occasionally I wish it trusted the audience a little more to figure things out. While I like that Ortega’s one friend becoming a spokesperson against school shootings – it’s a nice example of the many different responses people have – it often felt like he was there to say out loud what the audience was supposed to already be thinking. I had a similar response to the therapy scenes. OK, my first reaction to the therapy scenes was that I wasn’t prepared for Shailene Woodley to be old enough to be a therapist without someone making a quip about her looking like she just got out of high school herself. I know she’s twice the age or Ortega’s character, but it took me a moment to settle. My second reaction though was that the therapy scenes felt like a shortcut to make points that could’ve been made elsewhere. I think it’s good that her character is going to therapy. The scenes just weren’t interesting enough to justify the time spent there. I’m used to those scenes in movies. I preferred the scenes that weren’t so familiar, like realizing Ortega’s sister thought Ortega was mad at her because of the phone call that day of the shooting. Or that wonderful scene of Bowen trying to figure out her response after Ortega dumps all that information on her at the end.
Overall though, an impressive movie. It tackles the topic of school shootings without trivializing them or sensationalizing them. Ortega gives a multi-faceted performance that makes me very curious about where she’ll go next. While it’s a bit of an “Afterschool Special” of a movie, it successfully navigates a lot of tones to make a coherent whole.
Verdict: Strongly Recommend
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