Heavily pre-billed in the press, Freefall deals with the credit crisis and related matters as seen through the eyes of three disparate men: a smarmy mortgage salesman who sells anyone he is able to down the river, a client of his and incidentally a former schoolfriend who is suckered into taking out a mortgage he can't afford, and a high-powered and utterly soulless banker involved in the dubious business of repackaging debt which was at the core of the problem. Needless to say, the mortgage salesman and the banker are scum and the mortgage defaultee, a family man with two young children is merely 'aspirational'. He is sold the idea of owning a home of his own and, unfortunately and against his wife's better judgment and counsel, follows his heart rather than his head. That, in a nutshell, is it. As we all know, the whole collateralisation scam of repackaging debt, including so-called sup-prime mortgages, ended very badly, so there is, not surprisingly, not much suspense involved in watching Freefall. It is all filmed in that hand-held, guerrilla type of filming which is usually effective in adding a certain drama to otherwise rather mundane scenes — and, it has to be said, often spurious drama — and at times the dialogue seems to be ad libbed, although whether of not it was I can't say. The problem with Freefall is that there is less to it than meets the eye. It is an apparently worthy exercise but it chooses to pass on its message with no subtlety whatsoever. In some ways Freefall is rather like reading an evangelical tract, and that is a shame. At the end of the day, it is all sound and fury signifying a great deal less than it would seem to want to. It is like watching a cartoon and, indeed, the story, or what there is, would work well in graphic form. The characters, for all the emotion of the sad wife who goes along with her husband's dreams and the pitiful spectacle of the banker realising there is nothing to his life except his work, are flat and remain unresolved. A slight attempt is made to flesh out the mortgage salesman at the end of Freefall when he is shown moving on from flogging mortgages to drumming up investment of 'green initiatives', but it is a slight coda and far to slight to redeem Freefall's lack of depth. There's nothing wrong with Freefall and as a piece of TV drama is isn't half bad. The problem is that neither is it as good or as significant as it seems to think it is. Two cheers for effort.
Review of Freefall
