STUDIO: Roadside Attractions
RELEASE DATE: May 30, 2008
STARRING: Lee Pace, Catinca Untaru, Justine Waddell, Emil Hostina, Robin Smith, Jeetu Verma, Leo Bill, and Marcus Wesley
WRITTEN BY: Dan Gilroy and Nico Soultanakis & Tarsem Singh
DIRECTED BY: Tarsem Singh
GENRE: Drama/Fantasy
RATING: R

I'm often the first person to defend a visually sumptuous film. As much as Woody Allen fans will try and deny it, the form is still primarily a visual one. I've seen movies with no real comprehensible plot that worked for me simply on the power of their imagery and the emotions and ideas that they stimulated with it. In many ways, that's the magic of movies. But when a film tries to have it both ways, when it tries to graft a relatively traditional-but-boring plot on a movie that's really nothing more than a series of pretty pictures, it's bound to collapse. And that's exactly what happens to The Fall, Tarsem Singh's follow-up to the controversial The Cell from 2000, and itself a film that has been delayed two years since its Toronto Film Festival debut in 2006, and proof that this music video veteran may have a stunning ability to create beautiful imagery but he has next to nothing to do with it.

Lee Pace, who has been so great on ABC's Pushing Daisies, is only one of many actors swallowed by the lack of narrative cohesion at the center of The Fall. Pace plays a stunt man hurt in a horrible accident, who also happens to be lamenting his unrequited love, while he withers away in a hospital bed in 1920s Los Angeles. While there, our hero Roy befriends a five-year-old girl named Alexandria (Catinca Untaru). As a ruse to get the poor young child to find him more morphine so he can take his own life, Roy starts to tell Alexandria a fairy tale about a band of five men in a magical land, fighting an evil leader that has wronged each of them in their own way. Like Dorothy seeing her friends in Oz, we start to see people from Roy and Alexandria's real life in the magical fable, until the two heroes themselves have crossed the line between fantasy and reality.

Tarsem, who often goes by only his first name, reportedly shot The Fall in over a dozen countries over three years of his life. It's impossible to deny his dedication to visual stimulation that so many filmmakers forgo, but it's also not enough to carry an entire theatrical experience. The themes of The Fall are very poorly developed and there's no dramatic energy to the piece at all. If you think even briefly about what Roy is doing - having a child help him commit suicide - he becomes a hard character to root for, which leaves us only with poor Alexandria. Newcomer Untaru may be cute, I'm sure she's a sweetheart, and it pains me a bit to be critical of a toddler, but she simply doesn't work for one moment. She's shockingly inconsistent and miscast. I don't blame her. She's young and I'm sure she had fun making the movie. But it's indicative of how little Tarsem thought about the actual characters in The Fall that he cast someone who, I'm sorry to say, can't act. It always feels like a performance, which, combined with the lack of story, forces the audience to stay distant, never allowing the visuals to wash over them like they should.

With unbelievable and unsympathetic characters, all that's left in The Fall is the visuals. At home, when a viewer can pause the movie and truly admire the pretty pictures, I think The Fall will work better, especially on Blu-Ray. But in theaters, a viewer demands more, something emotional or dramatic to carry them through a film and Tarsem never provides anything like that at all. It's a hollow exercise in cinematography and art design, something that will appeal to only the least plot-centric film goers. Everyone else will be left with nothing to hold on to in The Fall.