Entertainment
The Fall is Broken
Greg Kaczynski |
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 A handsome, ripe Hollywood star (Lee Pace of “Pushing Daisies“), confined to a hospital bed because of a terrible stunt injury, uses an epic story full of wild imagery and larger-than-life characters to manipulate a crippled innocent immigrant girl (newcomer Catinca Untaru) to fetch morphine for him to kill himself. It sounds like a fairly engaging story. It sounds like the kind of tale that, while the story that the Hollywood gentleman shares with the girl is tantalizing, the drama that ensues between himself and the little girl would be even more thrilling. As expected, however, director Tarsem Singh errs on the side of being too extravagant, leaving his actors and story behind to fend for themselves in his second feature, The Fall.
The biggest flaw of this film is simply that there is no investment at all in any of these characters. When the movie opens, audiences know it’s in Los Angeles. They know that there’s been a terrible accident (well, they can guess) and they assume that the guy in the bed, Roy (Pace), is the man from the accident. However, they have no idea who he is. Throughout the film, they find out his girlfriend left him for the leading man, but they don’t really know who she is either, so it ultimately doesn’t matter.
To make things worse, Alexandria (Untaru) has double trouble. First of all, she shares the same problem within the writing: viewers have no idea who she is, nor do they really care. She’s introduced as a weirdly imaginative broken-English speaking little girl who randomly throws notes out of her bedroom window. The people of the hospital seem to know who she is, but for no known reason; she’s a cute little girl, but nothing separates her from all of the other cute little girls.
 In most other films, this is where the writing or the acting takes charge, the character comes forth as a ray of light and the audience falls in love with (or at least feels connected to) her. The writing falls flat in The Fall, however, because there’s nothing of any substance here, and the acting is utterly absent because the little girl playing Alexandria is not an actress.
Singh claims that he wanted to utilize not only an unknown to play Alexandria, but a non-actor child so that he could capture the innocence and genuine reactions of a true five-year-old in this situation. This tactic backfires, however, in that Untaru, while adorable as she is, is unable to carry a narrative. At times she mumbles, other times she drops non sequiturs that Pace has to awkwardly address, occasionally more than once. Overall, she hinders the film, is often distracting and doesn’t allow the story to move forward.
It’s a shame (for Singh) that great movies aren’t solely based on how they look, for in The Fall, as in his feature directorial debut The Cell, the quality of the film’s visuals far exceeds anything present in the plot or dialogue. As Roy tells Alexandria an epic tale about five men out to kill Governor Odious (a thinly veiled parallel to his own nemesis, the leading man who stole his girl), viewers see these colorful (yet also very flimsy) caricatures travel through stark wastelands and through brilliant, vast oceans to find the villainous governor. The scenery is, admittedly, gorgeous. The colors are vibrant, the photography is topnotch...everything about the visuals of this film are absolutely something to write home about. They just don’t make the movie that interesting.
 What happens, or what it feels like, is these landmark brilliantly shot scenes are really what Singh wanted to shoot and the story itself was simply an excuse to do so. The film (and the audience) suffers because of this. No matter how gorgeous the eye candy, if the characters are one-dimensional, if the story is barely present, what is projected onto the screen is merely one long music video after another, book-ended by compulsory exposition, and it becomes dreadfully boring after an hour.
Eiko Ishioka of Bram Stoker’s Dracula fame adds unto the pile of visual intensity with her trademark kaleidoscopic costumes. Again, no complaints here. The costumes are easy on the eyes, and many are, at the very least, works of art in and of themselves. They just don’t make for a solid storytelling experience.
The music is dramatic and pounding, curiously reminiscent of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (but by a different composer, Krishna Levy). It demands audiences to feel something for these adventurers that Roy tells the story of--worry, excitement, camaraderie--but it’s hard to feel anything more than just a passing interest for these hollow, cardboard cutout placeholders. From all angles, The Fall utterly lacks depth.
 What’s surprising is that quality filmmakers David Fincher and Spike Jonze have both attached their names to The Fall as “presented by” monikers. While they generally pump out quality stories with a sharp visual side, this movie has no lasting bite. Once the ending finally comes and, in true Wizard of Oz fashion, all of the characters from the fantastic stories are shown to be real people in the hospital and in the orchard, even the magnificent visuals are easily forgotten.
The Fall is now playing in limited release.
For more information, visit thefallthemovie.com.
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