The Fall

I don't have a paragraph of backstory or anything for this movie, so I am just going to jump right in here.

Alexandria(Catinka Untaru) is a little girl in the hospital with a broken arm in the 1930s; the beginning of cinema. Roy Walker(Lee Pace)is a Hollywood Stuntman in the hospital with a broken spine. One day fate chances them to meet. Alexandria is a precocious little girl with chubby cheeks, a deep desire to hear stories, a dark past and the wit of a girl above her years and she is drawn to Roy's stories. Roy is a very depressed young man who desperately wants to kill himself, but he has a vivid imagination. Together they team up to pass the time with a wild story. Roy tells Alexandria the story of 5 men out to kill an evil ruler. They all have their own reasons for wanting the ruler dead, but the main hero, a masked hero, finds love along the way. Back in real life, Roy is manipulating Alexandria to get her to get him drugs. Alexandria wants to hear the end of the story, so she does his bidding, wondering all the while if it is a good thing she is doing.

Directed by Tarsem (yes he goes by one name) The Fall is a luscious bore. To be fair, calling it luscious may be giving it too much credit. The fantasy world Roy weaves features a few stunning visuals that look jacked from M.C Esher artwork, but little else pops. The colors are rich to be sure, the richness of colors does not a movie make. The story in the fantasy takes forever to really get going and the real world is far more interesting, but it keeps getting interupted by the fantasy story. Pace is excellent in the role, but when he starts to double as the masked hero, I lost interest. Pace is not a super suave guy, and that role demands it. In the real world, Pace does an excellent job with Roy. In her first and to this date only movie role, the little romanian Untaru is perfect. We believe her when she is scared and revel in her small joys and brief happiness. The friendship they form is the heart of the movie, but it keeps getting bogged down in fantasy land.

Also, The Fall is relentlessly depressing right up until the very end. I am all for movies that challenge the ideals of the happy ending, but this was almost joyful in its depression. I understood the point of making the fantasy story get so depressing, because it makes the swift change in tone that much more emphatic in the end, but there was no let up throughout. Watching Alexandria get manipulated by Roy is tough to stomach at first, but it just goes downhill from there. Tarsem also directed The Cell which in itself was pretty relentlessly depressing, but at least the visuals in that one made the whole thing look pretty. Here, the depressing story doesn't get to hide behind those stunning visuals. Tarsem is trying to be incredibly visual here, but he fails. he fails badly and he fails often. It would have ben a better movie if he had pointed the camera at the oddly paired friends and let them talk through the movie.

Final Grade: D