The Fall Hollywood Movie Reviews:
A chunk of the movie is composed of fantasy sequences as Roy spins a fantastical, sometimes nonsensical adventure story. Improvisation (or is it customization?) leads to countless narrative shifts and leaps of logic, but his story ostensibly concerns a masked bandit (Pace himself) joining up with a crew of international vengeance-seekers: an ex-slave, an Italian demolitions expert, an Indian swordsman (the unspoken disagreement over what this racial designation entails is the movie's best, perfectly underplayed gag), and Charles Darwin -- accompanied, naturally, by a monkey.
These segments indulge in the director's love of perfectly framed imagery: He's obviously fond of deserts, slow motion, rich colors, fire, and more horses -- in fact, it's possible that only select 12-year-old girls love horses more than Tarsem. He's made c ountless music videos and commercials, but the ever-shifting tall-tale narrative keepsThe Fall dreamlike, rather than, say, Gatoradesque.
The fantasy sequences were shot bit by bit over the course of four years in over a dozen countries, in downtime during various commercial and video shoots, yet the different settings -- a stone maze within a castle; a tiny island visited by a swimming elephant; the cityscape painted blue -- look surprisingly unified in their beauty. The circumstances of thefilmmaking keep coming up alongside the filmmaking itself, not because The Fall is only impressive with asterisks describing its technique, but to demonstrate the filmmaker's unconventional and dedicated approach to material that could be as familiar as watching The Wizard of Oz on cable.
For a movie with such audacious, lush, and inventive images (and, yes, production backstory), the story and themes of The Fall bring to mind a whole lot of other audacious, inventive films, including several by Terry Gilliam (particularly The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and the little-seen, mostly-reviled Tideland), and even a couple of recent ones about the transformative power of storytelling and mythmaking (Be Kin d Rewind and Son of Rambow). Indeed, the screenplay is actually based on a Bulgarian film whose title translates as Yo Ho Ho (maybe the moment when Roy mistakenly believes Alexandria craves a pirate story is intended as homage). Even given the countless sources, Tarsem obviously has forged a strong bond to this material, carrying it on the back of his day job for so many years. Occasionally, though, the film feels like a tribute, or, in keeping with his painterly frames, a restoration; he's still developing his personality as a director.
The Fall is a warmer, funnier movie than The Cell, but it doesn't pop with a particular sensibility the way the films of colleagues like Fincher and Jonze do. Sometimes the gorgeous slo-mo fantasy stuff slows to a near-crawl, as if the director was picturing a few frames, not a full scene. The scenes between Roy and Alexandria have a drawn-out quality too, but it's more natural, with both Pace and Tarsem adroitly performing around Untaru's natural, guileless charm. Ultimately, the film's originality is in its approach: its heedless, strangely fitting mixture of the technical and the ineffable.At a Los Angeles hospital in the 1920s, Alexandria is a child recovering from a broken arm.
The Story:
Although Roy develops genuine affection for Alexandria, he also has an ulterior motive: by telling tales and gaining her trust, he tricks her into stealing morphine from the hospital pharmacy so he can attempt suicide.
As the line between fact and fantasy blurs, real-life people begin to populate Roy's fictitious stories and the stories themselves become a more collaborative tale to which Alexandria also contributes. A hospital nurse (Justine Waddell) becomes the center of a romantic feud between Governor Odious and the masked bandit, who turns out to be Roy. Alexandria herself becomes a character in the story; while Roy is the masked bandit in her imaginary version of the story, she is his daughter. Mesmerized by the epic, ever-changing story, Alexandria returns to the pharmacy to pilfer another bottle of morphine for Roy. While climbing on a ladder to reach the pills high on a shelf, she loses her footing and falls, injuring herself.
After surgery (depicted in an expressionistic stop-motion animated sequence by Wolfgang and Christoph Lauenstein, typical of their style), Alexandria is visited by Roy in the recovery room, where he consoles her and confesses his deception. He can now only imagine a grim ending to the tale, and encourages Alexandria to ask someone else to tell it. Alexandria insists on hearing Roy's ending.
Cast & Crew
Written by: Dan Gilroy, Nico Soultanakis & Tarsem, based on the screenplay Yo Ho Ho by Valery Petrov
Directed by: Tarsem
Starring: Catinca Untaru, Lee Pace, Justine Waddell, Robin Smith, Marcus Wesley, Leo Bill, Jeetu Verma, Emil Hostina, Julian Bleach
Genre:Drama
Releases:October 30, 2009
