The Fall

Year: 2006
Genre: Fantasy
Directed: Tarsem Singh
Stars: Lee Pace, Catinca Untaru, Justine Waddell, Daniel Caltagirone, Marcus Wesley, Robin Smith, Jeetu Verma, Kim Uylenbroek, Leo Bill, Emil Hostina, Julian Bleach, Ronald France
Production: Absolute Entertainment

I will make a bold prediction. By the end of director Tarsem Singh's career, he will make at least one great film. One film that will not only be visually resplendent but a critical masterpiece worthy of immortality. One film which will be lovingly fawned over and studied like it were a chiseled Roman statue or a carefully cobbled mosaic. One movie that will invariably label the director ahead of his time and color his earlier films gems unrealized by contemporary audiences.

Pretension, thy name is Tarsem.

Why do I think this? Well despite all of his films being overly indulgent garbage, it's the kind of overly indulgent garbage that critics and academics trying desperately to seem smart will automatically gravitate towards. In a visual medium, Singh is a visual thinker and has the dexterity and technical know-how to create a truly unforgettable tableaux from frame to frame. Yet he's never the original scribe of his own films projects and depends too much on sloppy editing. These choices harpoon his ambitions and sabotage any real chance his films have to surmount their other minor problems.

Take The Fall for example. The plot of the film revolves around an injured, possibly paralyzed stuntman who befriends an innocent little girl while wasting away on a hospital bed. Roy (Pace) manipulates Alexandria (Untaru) into smuggling morphine for him so he can end his life. He tries to accomplish this by telling a nebulous fairy-tale to keep the young girl entertained as she herself recovers from a broken arm. In the fairy-tale a gallery of rogues are all seeking revenge on a nefarious regional governor who has wronged them all in some way.

Every once in a while, a list will worm its way out of cyberspace, enumerating history's most visually impressive films. The Fall seems to always appear as a special mention and with good reason. The striking natural vistas and pre-industrial urbanity that Singh captures over a rumored four year shooting schedule are simply breathtaking. Not a single set was built in service of The Fall. Instead Singh shot the film in 28 different countries and searched for the most surreal, mystical and colorful places on the globe, scouring the blue city-scape of Jodhpur, the reefs of Fiji and the deserts of Namibia for the perfect shot. The travel was not in vain either. Anyone impressed by the sleek green-screen produced mayhem of this year's Jungle Book (2016) should give The Fall a look then stick their head in a bucket of cold water.

Yet even the least discerning of movie viewers will shift in their seats in dismay over the wooden dialogue and boring characters. The story of the stuntman and the little girl aches from the pains of a cliched story made empty and hollow. This is despite the young Catinca Untaru aptly balancing loquaciousness with curiosity in a way few child actresses reasonably can. The story within the story is likewise airless and hollow suffocating the grandeur of the film like dead air on the radio. Lee Pace as a narrator doesn't help things, lacing his tall tale with a deadpan delivery so simpering and pathetic that it can vicariously make any audience miserable.

The screenplay written by Dan Gilroy and Nico Soultanakis preens with the pretentious, preachy quality of an Oliver Stone film only it doesn't have the luxury of interesting characters. There's an excess of feeling and sweeping, grandiose emotions yet the images paired with dialogue feel like their speaking something important and urgent but in two undecipherable languages.

Ugh, this film.

Tarsem Singh seems to do the impossible with this film, he manages to be both a bore and boorish. Usually the man's intensity and bluster is enough to at least make films like Immortals (2011) and The Cell (2000) interesting (if not unintentionally hilarious); not this time I'm afraid. I wanted to like this film and perhaps in the years to come, The Fall will go through a reevaluation. I suspect it will take Tarsem Singh writing his own screenplay, digging deep into the recesses of his own soul to get a film truly worthy of consideration thus putting his filmography in the limelight. I for one will need a lot of convincing before I give this wannabe Federico Fellini that kind of change of heart. Sorry, being pretty just doesn't cut it.

Final Grade: F