The Fall

2006 fantasy thing

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A paralyzed stuntman in a 1920's Los Angeles hospital meets a girl with a broken arm and begins telling her a story about five vengeful heroes and a monkey. She enjoys his disjointed tale of a search for the evil Lord Odious, but the storyteller might have ulterior motives.

I had to take a point away from this because the director, Singh, chose to go by a single name, Tarsem, for this production. And then there's the issue of this poster which is one of the ugliest things I've ever seen. I've seen The People's Tongue album covers that are easier on the eye than that. But then there was a really nice tribute to silent film stuntmen with Beethoven's 7th Symphony, 2nd Movement that teared me up a bit. Of course, it made me wonder if that particular piece of music, which I plan on dying to some day, is overused these days. It's no "Beyond the Sea" yet, but it's getting there. This is a movie with so much beauty in its individual parts that it's almost overwhelmingly sloppy. The sheer amount of locations the filmmakers would have had to travel to is impressive enough. Tarsem's visuals are often stunning, and the swimming elephants, dazzling colors, butterflies that morph into islands, and human meat chandeliers can remind a person why they watch movies in the first place. Unlike Alexandria, played by Catinca Untaru in a child performance that ranged from touching and with surprising depth to sort of annoying, I didn't care much for the story the guy was telling or its flat characters. But I was enamored with the visuals, these characters traveling to places that movies can usually only take us through the magic of CGI. I'm just going to assume computers weren't involved because it makes me like the movie more. Just as this movie's story and its story-within-a-story are all over the place, this is thematically all over the place as well, touching on dark thematic issues like depression, child labor, immigration, and suicide and happier ones like the powers of imagination. And movies. This doesn't always work and feels a little too long, but when it connects, it's almost magical. Buster makes a few appearances in that stuntman montage, by the way.