The Fall (2006)

One of the most bafflingly awesome movies I have ever seen. 9/10

I’m in a real bind, here.

Tarsem’s The Fall is amazing. It’s incredible. There’s been nothing else like it ever, basically; his earlier film The Cell (2000) comes close in terms of visuals, but without the same sweeping beauty and success, and I guess Vincent Ward’s What Dreams May Come (1998) was pretty sensational too in a lot of ways. But all of that is like dust by comparison: The Fall is one of the most elaborate visual tours-de-force in the history of the medium. Think of the most gorgeous parts of Kurosawa’s Dreams, for example, and then expand them into an entire feature rather than just a vignette. Salvador Dali made films, but The Fall is the film he wishes he could have made. It’s a triumph. It’s a miracle. It’s the visual equivalent of coming home from a hard day at work to your wife, Audrey Hepburn, who mixes you your favourite drink while you open the paper to discover the reunification of Christendom occured while you were out. Then you win the lottery.

It’s all sorts of excellent, to be sure, but I have no idea how I’m going to review it, or at least review it well.

First, there’s the problem of what it’s about, which is not much. Or, actually, it’s rather about too many things. Such paradoxes abound with The Fall, and I’m not going to go into too much detail about it particularly. A paralyzed stuntman in California in the 1920s tells a series of fantastic stories to a little Romanian girl who’s in the same hospital recovering from a broken arm. That’s the basic jist of it. Beyond that it would be impossible to do justice to what actually happens, so I’ll just provide the trailer in place of further exposition:

I think you get the picture. Or not.

This is not to say that the film is especially confusing, to be sure; the real-world narrative is straightforward enough, if sometimes hazily conducted, and the fantasy narrative is a fairy tale of classic construction, easily followable by a child. It’s the sheer multiplicity of things that happen that makes it impossible to adequately account for them all.

Everything about it is incredible. It’s listed as a film from 2006 because that’s when much of its primary shooting took place, but the rest of it was shot between then and now before finally being released in May of this year. Tarsem financed the thing on his own, more or less, and had complete creative control; he claims in this interview (well worth reading) that he was at a loss as to what to do with the money he had been making from his work as an advertisement/music video director, and, his early dreams of a family having been taken from him, decided to pour it into this one mad escapade of grandeur. For a normal person this sort of thing would take the form of a sports car or a vacation. For Tarsem it was The Fall, and he has enriched the world.

Most appallingly of all, every single one of the film’s astonishing set pieces is real, or at the very least a matter of practical effects. They’re all really there, in one form or another, from the inescapable labyrinth to the bottomless well of stairs to the great blue city. Not computer-generated or specially built. Real. This is not to say that there are no computer effects in the film, for in truth there must be at several points, but the locations are all legit. It’s simply astonishing.

I’ve got to rein this in or I’ll just go on gushing forever.

While the real-world narrative suffers sometimes from a sort of intentional vagueness, everything else is crisp and satisfying. Tarsem and his crew know how to compose a shot, and the editing approaches perfection. The film’s opening sequence – a slow-motion black-and-white sequence showing the aftermath of one of the stuntman’s stunts – is sort of a masterpiece in itself, although it stands on its own stylistically as far as the rest of the film is concerned. There’s an ominous puppet sequence later on that I can’t even begin to describe. The costumes are splendour incarnate, as you’ve no doubt seen from the trailer, and the whole of the thing is underscored by the Allegretto from Beethoven’s 7th Symphony and some other more subtle stuff besides, all of it to excellent effect.

I had never heard of a single one of the actors in The Fall (though I have since seen Lee Pace again in Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day) and so cannot comment on how their work here stacks up to their performances elsewhere, but it all seemed pretty good. The fact that most of the performances were good but unspectacula is what’s keeping this at around a 9 for me rather than something higher, honestly, but even that’s some pretty faint damnation. Lee Pace does a fine job as both the increasingly bitter stuntman and the revenge-seeking Masked Bandit, while Justine Waddell, as Nurse Evelyn and the Princess, carries a quiet beauty in both incarnations. Everyone else is fine, too, with Leo Will’s turn as both a hospital orderly and the English naturalist Charles Darwin being particularly fun.

The real star here, though, is the young Alexandria (Catinca Untaru), the unsettlingly innocent little girl at the heart of the story. With her unwieldy plaster cast and her gap-toothed smile, Alexandria brings something both unexpected and necessary into the stuntman’s life, and manages to extract from his trough of despair a little happiness for both of them, however hard-won. The performance would be remarkable from anyone, but at her age it’s almost unthinkable. There’s a lyrical magic to the way she speaks, as if her literal understanding of the words being said is fleeting but some far deeper understanding remains unshakeable. She’s also adorable.

At any rate, you could hardly do better than The Fall if you want a feast for the eyes coupled with a fine and mostly comprehensible story. Morally speaking there’s nothing in it to really offend apart from some violence, flirtations with suicide and occasionally horrifying imagery (the villain’s anonymous dog soliders are especially disturbing), so if you’ve been looking around lately for a way to blow someone’s mind this is a pretty safe way to go about doing it.

A final note: details have begun finally to emerge about Tarsem’s next project, which is making me salivate like the dog that I am. It’s called War of the Gods, being concerned with lots of ancient Greek-type drama (including Theseus and the Titans and other excellent stuff), and has been described by the director as “Caravaggio meets Fight Club.” Sign me up. Right now.

This has not been a very good review, but I don’t care. It’s late, I’m tired, and The Fall is a radiant marvel.