The Fall movie review (2008) | Little White Lies

The Fall

03 Oct 2008 / Released: 03 Oct 2008

Words by Dan Stewart

Directed by Tarsem Singh

Starring Catinca Untaru, Justine Waddell, and Lee Pace

Two men in traditional Mexican charro outfits, standing on a paved walkway in front of an archway.
Two men in traditional Mexican charro outfits, standing on a paved walkway in front of an archway.
1

Anticipation.

A fantasy children’s movie from the director of The Cell. Pretentious much?

5

Enjoyment.

Endlessly original and wonderfully shot. A banquet for the eyes.

4

In Retrospect.

Not as clever as it would like to be, but a thrilling, beautiful film nonetheless.

Tarsem Singh’s oper­at­ic fan­ta­sy is end­less­ly orig­i­nal and won­der­ful­ly shot. A ban­quet for the eyes.

A direc­tor who calls him­self by a sin­gle name nor­mal­ly sets alarm bells ring­ing, and Tarsem Singh’s pri­or body of work doesn’t exact­ly silence them. His only film, 2000’s The Cell, was a messy ser­i­al-killer movie with Jen­nifer Lopez, marked out by some extra­or­di­nary fan­ta­sy scenes but crip­pled by pre­ten­sions. Luck­i­ly, he has man­aged to mar­ry his unique eye with a ser­vice­able sto­ry, and the result is a sur­pris­ing delight.

The Fall begins in 1920s Los Ange­les. Alexan­dria (new­com­er Cat­in­ca Untaru), a 10-year-old recov­er­ing from a bro­ken arm befriends Roy Walk­er (Lee Pace, from TV’s Push­ing Daisies), a youth­ful crip­pled man who begins to tell her a sto­ry of four adven­tur­ers exiled by an evil count. As the film goes on, both their lives become inter­twined in Walker’s increas­ing­ly des­per­ate fictions.

Plot-wise, The Fall is super­fi­cial­ly sim­i­lar to The Princess Bride, with its post­mod­ern struc­ture and child­like tales of der­ring-do. How­ev­er, a far more apt antecedent is Ter­ry Gilliam’s infa­mous flop, The Adven­tures of Baron Mun­chausen. Like that film, this boasts wild flights of fan­ta­sy, real­i­ty blend­ing with fic­tion, a cast of char­ac­ters with unusu­al skills and sto­ries, and a direc­tor will­ing to splash his unique artis­tic vision all over the screen.

The Fall has been a labour of love for Singh, who report­ed­ly filmed it in 18 dif­fer­ent coun­tries. As in The Cell he fills the film with Ori­en­tal and Asian influ­enced cos­tumes and designs, but in the ser­vice of the film rather than an option­al add-on to it. The result is a riot of colour and action, a joy­ful mar­riage of the director’s vision­ary style and the extra­or­di­nary art direc­tion. The fan­ta­sy sequences are sim­ply beau­ti­ful, using the world’s stage as a back­drop and rarely resort­ing to cheap visu­al effects.

Where the film doesn’t suc­ceed so well is in its nar­ra­tive, which becomes over­bur­dened with Walker’s back­sto­ry and too often takes itself too seri­ous­ly. There are pre­cious few jokes, and the film’s final reel takes it from kid’s film mate­r­i­al to some­thing more grown up alto­geth­er. But who cares when a film looks as gor­geous as this? Unfor­tu­nate­ly, its quirky orig­i­nal­i­ty will no doubt see The Fall suf­fer a sim­i­lar com­mer­cial fate to Mun­chausen. It will be a shame, because you won’t see a more cre­ative film this year.

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