InsaneJournal

The Fall

A couple of days ago I went to see The Fall, an opulent fantasy/allegory directed by Tarsem Singh.  Tarsem (as he is called) is best known for directing music videos and commercials.  His pervious feature film is The Cell, a 2000 science fiction film starring Jennifer Lopez and Vince Vaughn which received pretty bad reviews and was generally dismissed as being all style and no substance. 

I’ve never seen The Cell but I wasn’t expecting much from The Fall.  I went to see it mainly because I’m a fan of Lee Pace.  Pace is best known for his work on the television shows Wonderfalls and Pushing Daisies but he’s played a MTF transsexual (The Soldier’s Girl) and In Cold Blood killer Dick Hickcock (Infamous) in Wonderfalls, Pushing Daisies)—just the sort of bizarre combination of roles that attracts my attention. 

The story of The Fall is fairly straightforward.  It is set at the dawn of the motion picture era it concerns two patients recuperating from falls in a Hollywoodland hospital.  One is a little girl named Alexandria (Catinca Untaru was is the cutest little thing I’ve ever seen)  who has been working as a fruit picker and broke her arm when she fell from a tree.  The other is Roy (Lee Pace), a stuntman who is suffering from paralysis that may or may not be permanent as the result of a back injury he incurred when he fell from a horse during the shooting of a cowboy movie.  We later learn that his accident may have been a suicide attempt.

Roy and Alexandria befriend each other and he begins to tell her a story about a mismatched band of adventurers including an Italian explosives expert, an Indian prince, a masked bandit and Charles Darwin (who wears an amazing multi-color fur coat), and their efforts to stop the evil Governor Odious. 

Making the story up as he goes along, incorporating other patients, hospital workers and every little bit of information he has about Alexandria, Roy soon has his audience of one captivated.  From there he starts manipulating her to do things for him, specifically to get him pills so that he can commit suicide (ah, the days when a very tiny child could toddle into a hospital infirmary and make off with a bottle of morphine).

The fantasy sequences in The Fall are lavish and ornate, full of vivid colors with an emphasis on the exotic-- Indian, African, Asian and Middle Eastern motifs.  I actually found the exoticism to be a bit much.  To me scenes of frenzied “primitive” drumming and dancing seem a little too close to racial stereotyping.  Or maybe they just reveal a little too much of Tarsem’s roots in music video…  Still, there were some truly gorgeous images, some with sadomasochistic undertones that I responded very strongly to. There’s a scene where Lee Pace is half-conscious and tethered to a post in a vast desert under the beating sun where the camera lingers over scraped cheek and peeling lips that I found  particularly memorable... 

While spectacle is the main thrust of The Fall I actually found its content rather affecting to the point where I wish it had been more carefully developed.  The Fall touches on some potentially interesting ideas about the way that stories can be used to both control and to heal.  Early on Roy is very deliberate in creating his story to please Alexandria but as his emotional state deteriorates he seems to lose control of the fantasy.  She is hurt and frightened as he kills off his characters but he can’t seem to stop it any more than he can stop his own pain.  I would have loved to have seen more exploration of this concept of deliberate versus unconscious story telling; however that wasn’t really the film’s focus.  It was, like Across the Universe, more of a dance than a novel, more about motion, space and color than about character, story and ideas.  Still, it almost seemed like there were enough half formed characters, story and ideas that I was sort of disappointed not to see more done with them.