The Fall

Sadly, The Fall must be filed under noble failures, alongside similarly obtuse and grandiose flop Terry Gilliam’s Tideland. Like that bold but wildly uneven film, Tarsem’s unbridled vision vastly exceeds his narrative grasp. The story unfolds mostly from the viewpoint of a little girl named Alexandria, who’s in a hospital in the ’20s after breaking her arm in a fall. She meets a fellow patient: charming and bedridden stuntman Roy Walker. Roy begins telling her parts of a tall tale each day, seemingly to pass the time at first but ulterior motives rear their ugly head as Roy’s inner despair deepens. The tale itself is where Tarsem gets to play with his breathtaking visual style. It’s the meat of the movie and most viewers will wish there was more follow through on the Princess Bride meets 300 style of campy humour and the viciously stylized melodramatic adventure established at the start of the telling. The tale concerns five heroes — an Indian, an ex-slave, an Italian explosives expert, Charles Darwin and a masked bandit — who all swear revenge, due to separate and comical circumstances, on evil Governor Odious, who’s responsible for the dastardly deeds. Reality and fiction blur and people from the hospital begin populating the tale. It’s promising and beautiful but that seems to be all Tarsem delivers: promise. He allows melancholy personal introspection to overwhelm the narrative and leaves the whole project feeling exhausting and unfulfilling. Non-actor Catinca Untaru and Pushing Daisies vet Lee Pace do a lot to anchor the film outside of the fantasy world. Pace has a forceful presence destined for great things and the device of keeping Catinca unaware of a lot of what’s really going on while being filmed actually worked in favour of her believability on screen. Aside from some throwaway deleted scenes there’s an extensive series of production features documenting many of the wild globetrotting locations used during filming. Tarsem has plenty to say in one of two commentary tracks, and he comes across as a somewhat manic live wire in much of the behind-the-scenes footage. He does seem quite aware of the kind of film he’s attempting to make, telling his cast as direction: "Just go all out. This will be the worst piece of shit ever or it’ll just click.” Actually, neither turned out to be the case. There is no disputing Tarsem is a visual genius but this story about storytelling could have benefited by getting its story straight.