HBO Max The Fallout (2022)

[Adam Lenhardt]

Title: The Fallout (2022)

Tagline: Nothing will ever be the same.

Genre: Drama

Director: Megan Park

Cast: Jenna Ortega, Shailene Woodley, Julie Bowen, Maddie Ziegler, Niles Fitch, Will Ropp, Lumi Pollack, John Ortiz, Yindra Zayas, Austin Zajur, Elliott Roca, Malcolm Santos, Christine Horn, Tiffany Rae Jones, Nancy Arnstein

Release: 2022-01-28

Runtime: 96

Plot: In the wake of a school tragedy, Vada, Mia and Quinton form a unique and dynamic bond as they navigate the never linear, often confusing journey to heal in a world that feels forever changed.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

Of the handful of movies I've seen centered around mass shootings, this is the first one I've seen that approaches a school shooting from the perspective of one of the young survivors.

Vada Cavell leaves class after she gets a text from her little sister, who is panicking after getting her period for the first time. Once she's talked her sister down, she heads into the bathroom and spots Mia Reed, a popular online dancer and influencer who happens to go to her school. Mia is touching up her makeup for picture day. Vada, who has the fashion aesthetic of a nine-year-old boy is mildly amused by the effort she puts into being perfect.

Their lives become inextricably intertwined when the blasts of an assault rifle echo in the hallway just outside the bathroom, and Vada and Mia take refuge in the same stall, climbing up onto the toilet so that the shooter won't be able to tell that it's occupied. A few minutes later, a boy staggers into the girls' room, and into the stall next to them. His brother has been shot. When he crawls under the partition to join Vada and Mia, they at first think he has been shot too, because the entire front of him is soaked with his brother's blood.

The whole thing plays out in just six minutes, from the first shot to the police shooting the gunman down. But for Vada, Mia, and Quinton it might as well have been an eternity.

The rest of the movie follows Vada as she grapples with what she has endured, the post-traumatic anxiety, the numbing depression, and the crushing survivor's guilt. Jenna Ortega is phenomenal as Vada; Vada is a girl who prides herself on being chill and low-key, a defense mechanism that is wholly inadequate to the crisis in which she is immersed, so it takes a long time for Vada to really express herself.

Nor are these Gen Zers particularly good at social interaction, period. There is a real specificity to this movie, the way these kids live through their phones, and the way they stumble toward making their thoughts and feelings known to one another. While the whole movie is told through Vada's point of view, through her we see how others are impacted. Mia, who has always been so extroverted, retreats into herself and the palatial estate where she lives. Quinton, who has suffered a greater loss than any of the other survivors, feels responsible for managing the grief of those around him, in ways that rarely allow him to navigate his own grief. Vada's best friend Nick throws himself into activism, much like David Hogg after the Parkland shooting. Vada's parents, played by Julie Bowen and John Ortiz, are loving and present but at a loss when it comes to helping Vada through. Vada's sister Amelia adores her, and has always been really close to her. She can't help but take Vada's withdrawn and closed off behavior personally.

The movie is attentive to both the personal trauma and the collective trauma of what has happened. The movie is not preachy or ideological at all, but the final scene is brutal for what it says about a society that can watch children be murdered over and over and over again and do nothing to stop it -- a society that tells these children over and over again that their lives don't matter, or at least don't matter enough to take meaningful action.

 

[Jason_V]

We watched this the other night---after my fiancé asked if I was going to be okay with something which seemed unrelentingly downbeat. I said sure, let's do it. While we were both engaged for the entire time, I was frustrated at the end.

Not a single adult in this movie-aside from Woodley's therapist-is present for these kids. Mia's fathers leave their high school daughter alone to go to Japan (pre-incident) and they don't keep in contact? They don't talk or get an alert and say "oh crap, we have to be home now to support our daughter"? Vada's parents are equally as useless since all they want to do for most of the movie is simply get over what happened. Quintin's family is MIA. In one scene, a teacher is reminding the kids about a pop quiz...if I did my math right, this is about two weeks after the shooting.

My reaction to my fiancé was "F that pop quiz and the broom you rode in on." His come back, logically, was this is what adults do: try to be normal, move on and forget things happen. Which I agree with, but even as a soon to be 43 year old, I expect more from adults. I guess I shouldn't.

A scene near the end where Julie Bowen needs a massive glass of wine to deal with some things Vada confesses to her also rubbed me the wrong way. She's medicating and getting through with alcohol, but also seems to judge Vada for getting through the only way she knows how. Parents are absent here, and they shouldn't be. We knew this to be the case from the beginning of the movie when Vada's sister has her period and calls Vada, not Mom.

Agree the performances are very good to great (even the adults, who I don't care for as a collective group of characters) and this is a worthwhile film. I will never say, though, I enjoyed it or need to see it again.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

Not a single adult in this movie-aside from Woodley's therapist-is present for these kids. Mia's fathers leave their high school daughter alone to go to Japan (pre-incident) and they don't keep in contact? They don't talk or get an alert and say "oh crap, we have to be home now to support our daughter"?

There are two reasons for this:

1. From a logistical standpoint, it provided Mia and Vada a safe, isolated place to explore their grief and their feelings for each other.
2. It helped humanize Mia in Vada's eyes; she was basically in awe of Mia at the beginning of the movie, and then learning that Mia is basically the one percenter version of a latchkey kid challenges some of those preconceptions.

Vada's parents are equally as useless since all they want to do for most of the movie is simply get over what happened. Quintin's family is MIA. In one scene, a teacher is reminding the kids about a pop quiz...if I did my math right, this is about two weeks after the shooting.

While I definitely agree that Mia's dads dropped the ball in a major way by not rushing home, I'm a lot more sympathetic to Vada's parents. It's not that they didn't want to help Vada through, it's that they felt completely helpless in terms of how to do it. They never experienced a mass shooting when they were kids, and it's a horrific thing completely outside of their experience as parents up until this point. Just as Vada is sort of feeling her way through the darkness, Vada's parents are doing the same trying to support her. All in all, by the end of the movie, I think they did as good as anybody could reasonably expect given the circumstances.

I also don't think Quintin's family is MIA, it's just that since the entire movie is told from Vada's perspective we don't get to see that part of his life. The phone call he got when he was at Vada's house spoke volumes to me about the state of that family; after losing one son, they probably get frantic anytime they don't know exactly where Quintin is.

His come back, logically, was this is what adults do: try to be normal, move on and forget things happen. Which I agree with, but even as a soon to be 43 year old, I expect more from adults. I guess I shouldn't.

There's also pragmatic concerns at work. The community's not going to be able to build a whole new school overnight, so there's no real alternative to going back to the scene of the trauma. The philosophy in this school's case is might as well rip the band-aid off and get it over with. Right approach? Almost certainly not. But again, I'm not sure there is a perfect solution.

A scene near the end where Julie Bowen needs a massive glass of wine to deal with some things Vada confesses to her also rubbed me the wrong way. She's medicating and getting through with alcohol, but also seems to judge Vada for getting through the only way she knows how.

Personally, given the series of revelations Vada dropped on her all at once, I thought her reaction was remarkably restrained.

We knew this to be the case from the beginning of the movie when Vada's sister has her period and calls Vada, not Mom.

To me that spoke more to the closeness of the sisters' relationship; it needed to be established early so that we'd really feel the depth of the fracture between them as Vada closes herself off and begins to pull away.

I will never say, though, I enjoyed it or need to see it again.

Yeah, this one will not be in rotation for frequent revisiting, that's for sure.

 

[Jason_V]

There are two reasons for this:

1. From a logistical standpoint, it provided Mia and Vada a safe, isolated place to explore their grief and their feelings for each other.
2. It helped humanize Mia in Vada's eyes; she was basically in awe of Mia at the beginning of the movie, and then learning that Mia is basically the one percenter version of a latchkey kid challenges some of those preconceptions.

Well, yes, granted, but the fact the parents were MIA (Mia...MIA...huh...just made that really tenuous connection...) are both in service of the plot. If these were believable adults/parents, we would have seen or heard from them...or they would have been on the first plane back. This is the writers saying "hey, we need these kids to be together so let's through out any semblance of logic."

While I definitely agree that Mia's dads dropped the ball in a major way by not rushing home, I'm a lot more sympathetic to Vada's parents. It's not that they didn't want to help Vada through, it's that they felt completely helpless in terms of how to do it. They never experienced a mass shooting when they were kids, and it's a horrific thing completely outside of their experience as parents up until this point. Just as Vada is sort of feeling her way through the darkness, Vada's parents are doing the same trying to support her. All in all, by the end of the movie, I think they did as good as anybody could reasonably expect given the circumstances.

Doing the best they can means therapy, Starbucks and nudging Vada back to school after a week or two. They didn't go to any of the remembrances or vigils or the protest Nick was engaged in. They're not trying to change anything we can see. They want to bury this as far down as humanly possible.

I also don't think Quintin's family is MIA, it's just that since the entire movie is told from Vada's perspective we don't get to see that part of his life. The phone call he got when he was at Vada's house spoke volumes to me about the state of that family; after losing one son, they probably get frantic anytime they don't know exactly where Quintin is.

Okay, fair. I took that scene to be Quintin was freaked out by being at Vada's and the call really wasn't a call. It was a decoy to give him an out to leave. But I can go with your interpretation too.

There's also pragmatic concerns at work. The community's not going to be able to build a whole new school overnight, so there's no real alternative to going back to the scene of the trauma. The philosophy in this school's case is might as well rip the band-aid off and get it over with. Right approach? Almost certainly not. But again, I'm not sure there is a perfect solution.

No perfect solution, but the teacher saying "Pop Quiz Friday and I'm not helping" is completely tone deaf to me.

Personally, given the series of revelations Vada dropped on her all at once, I thought her reaction was remarkably restrained.

Eh, if Julie Bowen was in the least bit attuned to either daughter, none of this would have been a shock to her. But she's not. Neither is Dad, but we don't see his reaction to any of this. I think I have a predisposition to being anti-adult and anti-parent in most things I watch for one reason or another. I want them to know how to be the perfect parents and what I think they should be...but I also know I didn't want that kind of relationship with my parents at that age (still don't...). It's tough, at least for me.

To me that spoke more to the closeness of the sisters' relationship; it needed to be established early so that we'd really feel the depth of the fracture between them as Vada closes herself off and begins to pull away.

Right, agreed...and it establishes how much Mom and Dad are disengaged from their daughters worlds. At least that's what it did for me.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

Well, yes, granted, but the fact the parents were MIA (Mia...MIA...huh...just made that really tenuous connection...) are both in service of the plot. If these were believable adults/parents, we would have seen or heard from them...or they would have been on the first plane back. This is the writers saying "hey, we need these kids to be together so let's through out any semblance of logic."

You're not wrong about it being a contrivance in service of the plot. But I definitely knew parents like Mia's, too.

Doing the best they can means therapy, Starbucks and nudging Vada back to school after a week or two. They didn't go to any of the remembrances or vigils or the protest Nick was engaged in. They're not trying to change anything we can see. They want to bury this as far down as humanly possible.

I don't think survivors of a mass shooting necessarily have a responsibility to effect change. For Nick, that was his way of coping with everything. But Vada made it pretty clear that wasn't her path. I really think Vada's parents just didn't know what the right thing to do was. I was sympathetic to them, because I probably wouldn't have either.

No perfect solution, but the teacher saying "Pop Quiz Friday and I'm not helping" is completely tone deaf to me.

It would be interesting to see a documentary about a school trying to resume normal operations after a mass shooting. I suspect, however, that no school would give permission to film during such a raw period. Time was definitely condensed in this movie, but I'm not exactly sure over how long of a period the story took place. It seemed pretty clear to me that it had been at least a few weeks since the shooting when Vada tried going back for the first time.

Eh, if Julie Bowen was in the least bit attuned to either daughter, none of this would have been a shock to her. But she's not.

She is hardly the first parent to not be fully aware of what their teenage child is up to. To the extent that Vada had a lot of independence to go out and make these questionable decisions, it seemed pretty clear in context that that was a privilege she had earned by being a good, well behaved kid up until the shooting.

And Vada was in such deep denial for so much of the movie than any attempt to get her to share here feelings would have gone nowhere.

Neither is Dad, but we don't see his reaction to any of this.

He doesn't have a lot of screen time, but we do him choose his moment well and really get through to Vada in a way that allows her a cathartic moment. I'm not sure I would have done as well in his shoes.

I think I have a predisposition to being anti-adult and anti-parent in most things I watch for one reason or another. I want them to know how to be the perfect parents and what I think they should be...but I also know I didn't want that kind of relationship with my parents at that age (still don't...). It's tough, at least for me.

Fair enough. I think I'm a lot more forgiving because a school shooting is just such a horrific thing that it's too big to tackle tidily, even by the best parents.

 

[JohnRice]

I just watched The Fallout, and the main comment I'd like to make regarding this discussion is that once a movie depicts people acting the way real people tend to act, it's accused of being unrealistic or calculated. There is no action depicted in this movie I don't personally know examples of real people doing in real life.

One thing to remember is we are only seeing slivers of what happens. It's a very low-key narrative. A type of storytelling that not everyone is comfortable with, but it requires the viewer to fill in some empty spaces and realize what they fill with might be wrong. We only see what Vada experiences, and only pieces of that. Many things are happening that we don't see.

One specific comment I have regards Mom having a gulp of wine late in the movie. I was definitely amused. It's one of her best moments. She needs to prepare herself. Vada just casually dumped a truckload of crap she is not ready to handle, but she's definitely doing her best to be helpful.

It dances around what is probably the main point, which is slammed home in the final seconds. That knocked me on my ass.

Ultimately, what might be considered flaws with the movie are the point. It's really displaying several extremely fundamental and inexcusable failings in our society.