I can’t help but favorably compare director Tarsem Singh Dhabdwar’s The Fall to the previous movie I saw in the theater, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The Fall tells a story that circles the globe without ever leaving a hospital bed; Crystal Skull can never let its viewers leave the safety of the green screen. Crystal Skull traces a jumble of names on a map, but its locales are just garish approximations; The Fall visits incredible real places and makes them imaginary. Crystal Skull begins in myth and legend and reveals that it’s all just alien science; The Fall begins in troubled reality and transcends it.
But The Fall shouldn’t need Crystal Skull’s straw man to stand as a good film. It succeeds on its own merits. A little girl in a hospital in the early 20th century befriends an injured movie stuntman, and he tells her a heroic fable stretching across stunning red and yellow vistas spangled with bursts of green, blue, and black. “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen filtered through Pan’s Labyrinth” is roughly accurate, but fails to confer Tarsem’s rich visual imagination and the elaborate costumes of Eiko Ishioka. Astonishingly, the film uses absolutely no computer-generated elements.
Some directors who are seduced by set pieces fall out of touch with their actors and plots, but Tarsem devotes considerable attention to the characters and the story. He took great care in the casting his leads: Alexandria, the young heroine, is played by Catinca Untaru, who learned English during the making of the movie, which gives her performance incredible veracity and spontaneity. The movie’s opening and closing segments – mirrored tributes to silent movies of the early 20th century – are unexpectedly emphatic and poignant.
The Fall is the natural conclusion of Tarsem’s artistic statement of intent in 2000’s Jennifer Lopez vehicle, The Cell. In that film, he accepted a studio’s mundane serial killer script and reworked it for his own purposes, most explicitly by using elaborate costumes and makeup to create an unconscious killer’s dream world. In the six years following, he used his fortune (made directing commercials) to create this extremely expensive movie.
Roger Ebert, who has a history of swooning for visual stunners, gave The Cell four stars and recently included it in his eponymous 2008 film festival. He didn’t leave himself much room to praise The Fall further, but he tries (“one of the most extraordinary films I’ve ever seen”). While the aesthetics are unimpeachable, the film is not perfect. The characters in the story-within-the-film are occasionally lost in the stunning set pieces, and the fable nature of the stuntman’s story indulges these oversights. The occasional moments of humor that slyly comment on the art of improvisational storytelling are welcome, but could have been more numerous and alleviated a few minor pacing issues late in the film.
But these are quibbles. The film is doubly successful for traveling so far into the realm of the fantastic without CGI. Many fantasies are meant to escape reality – a few hours in Oz before the audience is dragged back to Kansas – but The Fall achieves a more ambitious and difficult victory by finding fantastic things in the real world.
Tags: CGI, computer-generated imagery, Eiko Ishioka, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Roger Ebert, sensory overload, silent movies, Tarsem, Tarsem Singh, The Cell, The Fall
