The story takes place in Los Angeles some time around the turn of the 20th century--not coincidentally, the dawn of cinema. A hallucinatory black-and-white credits sequence establishes the film’s bold juxtaposition of reality and dreamscape, prodding us toward the liminal space between what we see with our eyes and what we see with our mind. This is the realm that Tarsem seems to relish, and it makes one wonder if he is capable of making a film that doesn’t take place primarily inside someone’s head, where the laws of physics and narrative logic lose their sway in favor of pure sensory intake (some might say overload).

We are introduced to our protagonist, a little girl named Alexandria (Catinca Untaru) who has a broken arm and a tenuous grasp of the English language. Simultaneously precocious and unassuming, she befriends Roy Walker (Lee Pace), a Hollywood stuntman who is paralyzed after a devastating stunt-gone-wrong involving his leaping off a railroad bridge onto a horse. Roy’s physical damage is a pale shadow of his inner turmoil, which we gradually learn is a result of his girlfriend’s betrayal and has taken him to the brink of suicide. Ostensibly to pass the time, Roy begins telling Alexandria a fantastical story about a quintet of unlikely exotic characters--a masked bandit (Pace), an escaped African slave (Marcus Wesley), a silent Indian mystic (Julian Bleach), an explosions expert (Robin Smith), and Charles Darwin (Leo Bill)--who have sworn vengeance against a common enemy named Governor Odious.

Much of the film takes place in the world of Roy’s ever-evolving storyworld, which Tarsem strings together with gorgeously saturated imagery from more than two dozen countries. We get amazing vistas of orange sand dunes contrasted with a brown desert and blue sky (if this looks familiar, it’s because you saw the same location in The Cell), underwater shots of a swimming elephant (it’s much more glorious than it sounds), and a blue city surrounding a massive castle that includes staircases that would make M.C. Escher proud. While the physical locations are insistently real, Tarsem and first-time feature cinematographer Colin Watkinson give them the veneer of a dream, turning reality into mindscape. The story that Roy spins over a period of days has the fragmented, staccato cadence of something being made up on the fly, which is precisely what it is. Critics who complain about narrative clumsiness have somehow managed to ignore the fact that most of the story is a purposeful sham, albeit one that fires the imagination of those willing to toss convention aside and let the film’s imagery engulf them.

However, The Fall also works on an emotional level, in that Roy’s fantastical story has potent connections to his own reality. Tarsem and coscreenwriters Dan Gilroy and Nico Soultanakis, who have essentially remade a 1981 Bulgarian film called Yo ho ho, offer a heady mixture of melodrama and comedy to balance out the storybook visuals. Ever the inquisitive child, Alexandria’s voice sometimes breaks into Roy’s story with the kind of unassuming candor that adults seem to lose sometime around puberty (after Roy describes each of the vengeful characters, Alexandria pipes in with a simple “I like him”). Eventually she infiltrates the story completely, forcing us to recognize the inescapable threads that bind together their fiction and reality. Even though it takes a while to build up its steam and may be too deliriously off-kilter for some viewers, The Fall is ultimately a deeply moving and life-affirming story about the beauty of redemption that is wrapped up in what can only be described as a love poem to the power of movies.

Copyright ©2008 James Kendrick

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