Director: Tarsem Singh
Writer(s): Dan Gilroy/Nico Soultanakis/Tarsem Singh

Cast:
Catinca Untaru – Alexandria
Justine Waddell – Evelyn
Lee Pace – Roy Walker
Kim Uylenbroek – Chief Doctor

Preamble:
Tarsem Singh takes a stab at an elaborate fairy tale for adults, while crafting a pretty good character study of storytelling as an organism.

Plot Points:
A little girl hospitalized from a fall befriends a movie stuntman hospitalized by an accident on a film set.   The man begins telling the little girl an “epic story” and the line between reality and storytelling is blurred with increasing real world consequences.

The Meat:
Tarsem Singh first came into public notice with his 2000 sprawling surrealistic vision ‘The Cell.’  Noticeably heavy on imagery and sparse with dialogue and significant character development, his background as a music video director was painfully obvious. With ‘The Fall’ (presumably his next flick will be ‘The Ill’), he ventures closer towards having storytelling to match his visuals but still falls short in a few areas. 

When 5 year old Alexandria stumbles into Lee Pace’s room of a Los Angeles hospital, he is clearly depressed and embroiled in conflict with his Hollywood employers. To divert his attention, the man (Pace) begins telling the little girl (Alexandria) what he describes as an “epic” story of adventure and love.  Great, natural interaction between them provides some of the best dialogue between a child and adult in recent memory.

 

Alexandria

 

It’s especially fun watching realty bleed into the stories he tells.  A nurse doubles as a princess.  When Alexandria sneezes as a character does as well.    Pace even puts himself into the story as a protagonist, and fills his tale with the kind of clichéd plot devices found in both traditional fairy tales and old films (which are of course old fairy tales by modern movie standards).  His real life rival becomes a despicable villain (the aptly named Governor Odious), so no character development is really needed. The self-referencing works well. 

Most notable is the way turmoil and pain from Pace’s real life bleed into the story, darkening it to a point that is often beyond the little girl’s grasp.  Playfully she repeatedly tries to bring it back to something a little girl wants to hear, which takes his mind out of the shadows for a bit.  It’s an interesting take on the way a child’s imagination is able to rescue not just them from their problems, but others as well.  Her zeal becomes contagious, and art begins to imitate life. When an imaginary Princess is shot by one of Pace’s characters, the little girl yells that “she can’t die”. Pace obliges, returning her to life, but revealing some obsessive feelings of his own for the woman who has just broken his heart in reality.  The mulligan is provided by Pace’s self-centered, possessive fantasy about a ‘golden locket’ no one else could open until it was pierced by his bullet.  Notions like this are not something the little girl can really appreciate, but it seems to be fairly cathartic for Pace when he’s not indulging in huge amounts of morphine.

While the visuals and cinematography are beautiful,  it’s only fair that someone as obsessed with visuals as Singh is be put to the same tests we would a photographer. And frankly, he suffers from the same problems that plagued Hype Williams’ directorial effort in ‘Belly.’  Almost everything in the film is too centered and overly posed.  Very little of the movement seems natural, in a pretty maddening case of not being able to see the forest for the trees.  In addition, Singh’s obsession with male form and musculature leads to many absolutely ridiculous uses of slow motion that serve no purpose other than to make sure we see his work. This is also a problem when — much like Zhang Yimou did in ‘Curse of the Golden Flower’ — Singh forces certain tableau to the forefront when intimacy was probably a better idea.

Find Your Center

Again..

One More for the Road

It all works out pretty well though, because a living breathing fairy tale is as suited for that style as his mindscape was in his previous film. And the question of whether a story belongs to the intended audience (why tell a story to others if you don’t care what they think?), or the creator (it’s an artist’s job to create and let others react) is always a fun one to revisit.

Movie – 7/10
DVD – 5/10

‘The Fall’ Trailer:

Review by Steve Broome
sbroome at coalminds dot com