I Hope Someone Remembers "THE FALLOUT"

 I've seen an awful lot of movies this year. Very, very few of them were better than Megan Park's debut feature "The Fallout". This is technically a 2021 film, in the sense that it premiered at festivals in a year where theaters were disrupted by covid, then was dumped to HBO Max in January of 2022, destined to be forgotten forever. That release is an awful shame for a film that really should be seen, both for its quality and for its specific meaning to Gen Z.

 When Gus Van Sant won a Palme D'or for "Elephant" in 2003, a naïve person could maybe believe that school shootings were a social issue dated to the late 1990s that wouldn't demand a greater place in pop culture. If only we lived in such a world. As anyone watching any news at any point in the past 20 years has surely accepted, school shootings are an epidemic that regularly destroys lives for American kids. This is obviously bad, and actual solutions to this problem should be made, but that hasn't happened yet and probably won't happen for a long while, if ever. What else can we do? Make art that helps people make sense of it all. The Hollywood mainstream has gone this far without dealing with the issue much ("We Need To Talk About Kevin" garnered critical praise and a bit of mainstream attention all the way back in 2011, which is probably about it. "Mass", a brilliant film that failed to even make back it's $300k budget at the box office, came out in late 2021 to no attention). "The Fallout" probably doesn't count as mainstream either, despite starring Jenna Ortega (who spent 2022 being the MVP of just about everything and is probably one of the most famous young actors on the planet now) and Maddie Ziegler (a "Dance Moms" alum who sometimes acts on the side). 

 True to its title, here we see the fallout of a school shooting. We get perhaps 5 minutes of the background of a shooting, hiding in a bathroom, and then a whole screenplay to sift through the aftermath. Like "Mass", this is a script refreshingly lacking in easy answers. Jenna Ortega's Vada finds herself in this peculiar space of grieving an event she only half experienced, and turning her nose up at anyone who experienced a decimal less of it. In truth, this is a character that is more sympathetic than she is likable, but I enjoyed that. It's not fair to expect traumatized teenagers to be thoughtful or generous; the sarcastic blowing off of her therapist (a bit role for Shailene Woodley, who I suppose was the only "famous" person in the cast at the time of filming) and constant bad decisions reads as more authentic than most films adults write about teens. The people she surrounds herself with also fall into this territory of being only partially likable but fully understandable. Ziegler's Mia theoretically has everything except a true friend, a tragedy that sounds a bit too easy but which works in a movie where everyone of every background is numb. Vada puts her on a pedestal, but learns her life wasn't all that great. That part is simple. Much tougher is balancing "Mia seduces the protagonist into a life of nihilism and hard drugs" with "Mia should never be seen as a bad person", and I really think Megan Park pulled it off. Ortega is brilliant here, moreso than in anything else I've seen her in, and Ziegler to her credit is also perfectly good enough. They both prove how capable they are of handling such dark material - not a slam dunk, given their starts on the Disney Channel and on Dance Moms! A boy who Vada is friends with fancies himself an activist despite having even less direct involvement in the tragedy than her; she thinks he's exploiting the event to make himself feel better, he drags her because he's doing something and she's doing nothing, and the story treats both ideas as basically fair. The one "misstep" here is the saintly brother of one of the murder victims, who is indeed overly generous and only exists to hammer home that people who have it worse than you can still have optimistic attitudes. That's not some grand sin of a message, it's just odd in a story that consciously dodges being a "message" movie in most other areas.

 The film's ending is a brutal stroke of tough love... maybe too brutal for teen soap it is? I know that school shootings will not stop tomorrow. I don't need the movie to remind me that it's an endless issue. At the same time, I think I do *get* it: everyone involved will need to have some kind of coping mechanism and learn to enjoy living in a world where this happens, because they cannot stop it from happening. It's not pleasant to end the only school shooter flick explicitly aimed at teenagers by kind of leaning into that nihilism, but the fact of the matter is that the Parkland kids have not succeeded in changing things, as hard as they've tried and as brave as they've been. "The Fallout" is effortlessly gritty. It is also one of the rare films of the last decade where that word isn't a pejorative. I truly hope that at the bare minimum this film avoids the bloodletting currently happening around HBO, because it deserves to be seen for as long as this problem still exists.