Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4315 in DVD
• Released on: 2009-07-20
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Format: PAL
• Number of discs: 1

DVD Description
How far would you go to get what you want?

A powerful and moving drama, Freefall follows the lives of three men with everything on the line. Gus (Aiden Gillen) is the high flying city exec who packages and sells bundles of mortgages for extortionate profit. Dave (Dominic Cooper) is the mortgage broker who can make anything happen, and when Dave offers Jim (Joseph Mawle), his old school friend, a way out of the council flat he and his family have been stuck in for years, it’s an offer that is too good to refuse. A way of fulfilling his lifelong dream of becoming a homeowner.

When the market collapses, each character is confronted by a shocking, revelatory truth that shines a burning light on the new realities we face.

Customer Reviews

Best drama on BBC for ages
I personally thought this was great, although before watching it, the story line didn't grab me as being interesting enough to keep me watching, but strangely, it did. I thought the acting was good, apart from Sarah Harding (from Girls Aloud) who actually wasn't in it that much, but it was a bit frightful when she was. Apart from that, I thought it was a decent play about what is happening to the broad spectrum of people in today's society.

Interesting social-commentary drama
The BBC's latest one-off drama is a story of three main characters and how their lives are effected by the recession. It begins in 2007, just before the crash hit and picks up again in 2008, in the belly of the beast.

The main characters are Dave (Dominic Cooper), an arrogant and unscrupulous mortgage lender who is on the ascendancy, buying a new house for him and his beautician girlfriend (Girls Aloud' Sarah Harding, over-acting but having a lot of fun). When Dave bumps into old school friend Jim (Joeseph Mawle), he cannot resist luring him, his wife (Anna Maxwell Martin) and children into the promise of a better life with a larger house, and consquently a larger amount of money to pay in the long term. This is all manageable as long as the economy stays as it is...

Gus (Aiden Gillen) is a cold, driven man who only cares about making money. For him, closing a big deal is a sexual thrill, which he often indulges via an on-off relationship with Anna (Rosamund Pike). As a consequence of his obsessiveness Gus has a less-than perfect private life. He is a divorcee with a daughter who feels neglected by him, but as long as the money keeps rolling in, who cares right...?

Well, obviously the money and the success do not keep coming in, as we all know. When the banks and mortgage lenders hit deep trouble, and without wanting to give the whole story away, the lives of the characters all change for the worse in some form or other.

The film's acting and cast are generally good (with the earlier exception of Sarah Harding's excruciating cameo). Joeseph Mawle as Jim really gets into the role of the satisfied security guard-turned doomed man, while Anna Maxwell Martin is also quite impressive as his cautious and eventually vindicated wife. Dominic Cooper has the smugness, the swagger and the arrogance to provide a clear representation of the traits that landed the world in such financial trouble. The refreshingly realistic dialogue zips along nicely, as does the plot, sometimes filmed with interesting documentary-style camera angles. The

However, it is not perfect. The character of Gus never felt quite what the film wanted him to be. By the time he is confronted about his greed and avarice it feels as though the character has not done enought to convince the viewer he is anything more than a determined business man who should pay more attention to his daughter. It is also a bit of a missed opportunity that the character of Dave does not get more time on screen. While the other main players are experiencing turmoil, he is for the most part nowhere to be seen. It would have been interesting to see how the recession affected the man behind all the sales-talk, if there was anything else there at all.

Overall, Freefall is an interesting, fairly insightful look at how the difficult economic times affected different people, and how it was allowed to happen. It may have its limitations, but it is a well-made and entertaining watch and may provide a greater understanding of what these times really mean for the people of Britain.

Excellent, if uninformative, BBC drama
The recession is incomprehensible. Every day, the news waxes financial doom, and we're all having it drummed into us that the world is going to fall into the sun, hugely in debt, and it's because banks did something with money they didn't have. Freefall was touted as a drama that would explain the situation, but it doesn't, really. It's still very much worth watching, though.

It tells 3 stories, I suppose, although it focuses primarily on that of Jim and Mandy, played by Joseph Mawle and Anna Maxwell Martin respectively. They are a young couple with a young family, living in rented accommodation, and when Jim runs into old friend, Dave, he is persuaded into taking a mortgage to buy his first house, just before the financial crash.

Dave, himself, is a cockroach - the sort of chap that drives along in his cockmobile while singing aloud to Gabrielle because he's just earned himself a nice wad of commission. That it'll financially destroy the person that's signed their lives over to the lender is, puh, a petty insignificance. At the start of the film, he's dating a vacuous bint as portrayed by Girls Aloud's Sarah Harding in what turns out to be a (blessedly brief) dizzying showcase of her non-talent.

And, finally, there's Gus - and he's another weak point. The acting is brilliant - I tip my hat to Aidan Gillen - but they've made the character a pantomime caricature. He's twitchy, a coke junkie, soulless, unaware, intimidating... he comes across as having, if not a mental disorder, certainly a personality one. And that's where Freefall lets itself down (no pun intended).

There are no nuances - the baddies are sooper-bad and every bad situation is made the very worst it could be. After all, the financial crisis is serious enough without people losing their jobs, and not only people who are suddenly unemployed are struggling. Its being so heavy-handed and laying it on so thick meant the narrative becomes a little soap opera-ish, when it needn't have been: the *reality* of what's happening is serious enough to sustain a drama.

I don't know if this is a DVD worth actually buying, as it doesn't have too much replay value. But if you do get the chance to watch it once, I'd very much recommend it. It won't tell you about the logistics of the recession, nor explain the ins and outs of the banking industry, but it's well made, well acted (mostly) and it'll give you a healthy contempt for the banking industry. And, frankly, it deserves nothing less.