Review by Brian Tallerico

Tarsem Singh's The Cell (2000) was a visually sumptuous but incredibly hollow theatrical experience. Despite its shortcomings, the film heralded the debut of a cinematic painter who needed only to marry his original eye with a more consistent voice to become a very interesting director. Six years later, in 2006, the often-single-named (like Prince) director brought his follow-up, the two-letters-different The Fall, to the Toronto Film Festival and, after the very tepid-to-negative response there, it’s now being shown two years in limited release around the country. If anything, The Fall displays a director going the other way from the potential hinted at by The Cell, a filmmaker diving deep into his own flaws and surfacing with a series of visual landscapes so empty that the film they're trying to support collapses on itself.

The Fall takes place in 1920s Los Angeles and stars Pushing Daisies' Lee Pace as a bedridden fellow named Roy Walker, a stunt man deeply depressed by an on-set accident and the fact that his one true love is with another. While in hospital, Roy befriends a young girl named Alexandria (Catinca Untaru) and, while convincing her to steal the medication that will eventually numb his pain forever, he weaves a fairy tale for the poor waif. Roy spins a yarn of five heroes - a slave (Marcus Wesley), bandit (Emil Hostina), Indian (Jeety Verma), explosives expert (Robin Smith) and, most oddly of all, Charles Darwin (Leo Bill) - who all want to see the end of the evil Governor Odious (Daniel Caltagirone) for their own personal reasons. Naturally, before long, Roy and Alexandria are a part of the magical tale (a la how Dorothy’s friends end up in Oz) as well as the real world. Of course, Alexandria falls for the magical tale and Roy uses it to get the poor child to help him obtain morphine. It feels like someone should have mentioned  to Tarsem that having a hero convince a five-year-old to help him attempt suicide might make for a tale that can be hard to morally swallow.

The visual feast that Tarsem provides is certainly a tasty one, but it adds up to less than you can possibly imagine. Tarsem shot The Fall in eighteen different countries over three years and the imagery is clearly created from passion but film requires narrative cohesion and The Fall has almost none. There's no emotional drama for the audience to latch on to or believable characters to identify with in either the “real world” or Tarsem's “Oz.” Plotlines in both halves of the film come and go, a probable byproduct of how easy it must be to lose narrative focus when you’re making a film over three years. The lack of structure almost works narratively when considered it's a story told by a dying, drugged-out man and a five-year-old, but is that a story you really want to hear? The Fall is a gorgeous film that tells a wildly inconsistent story with two protagonists that Tarsem never gives the audience much of a reason to care about. It's a movie that proves even though film is primarily a visual medium it needs to be more than just that to work as a complete experience.

Rating: ONE BONE

Release Date: May 30th, 2008

Rating: R

Starring: Lee Pace, Catinca Untaru, Justine Waddell, Emil Hostina, Robin Smith, Jeetu Verma, Leo Bill, and Marcus Wesley

Director: Tarsem Singh

Writers: Dan Gilroy and Nico Soultanakis & Tarsem Singh