#31. The Fall - Review

Tarsem's The Fall

Two years ago man known only by the name Tarsem released his visual masterpiece of celluloid known as The Fall. Four years in the making, this imaginative acid trip works as a re-imagining of the Wizard of Oz but plays more like an artist with multiple sets of hands painting on an endless canvas. Claiming to have not used any computer graphics, the images presented in The Fall are so stunning no modern day eyes will believe it. Tarsem and his cinematographer Colin Watkinson were able to produce landscapes and colors that at times appear to be physically impossible to manufacture on film.Tarsem's The Fall poster

The story of The Fall can appear contrived but ultimately ends with satisfaction. With the main plot line taking place during World War I, the main characters are both patients trapped in their injured bodies and in a small California hospital. The main protagonist is Alexandria, a young immigrant with both a broken arm and a natural precociousness that has not been seen in a child since Shirley Temple. The second lead role is Roy Walker, a stuntman for the Hollywood “flickers” that had been disabled while on the set of his latest film. Becoming suicidal after his girlfriend had left him for the star of the picture, Roy captivates Alexandria’s imagination with a tale of five heroic men who seek revenge against the man that did them all wrong. An ex-slave looking for his old master, an Indian searching for the man that kidnapped his wife, a mustachioed Italian bomb expert scouring the world for the man that had him exiled, a fictitious Charles Darwin and his monkey sidekick that dreams of killing the man that sent him a dead exotic butterfly, and finally a dashing masked bandit wanting retribution against the man that killed his brother. Between Roy’s enthralling story telling sessions he convinces Alexandria to break into the pharmacy to bring him morphine, which he hopes to use to facilitate his own death.

By following the five fugitives, the viewer is transported on an eye-popping expedition through beautifully exotic locales. In the beginning of their story, the men are trapped on an ocean oasis at least a mile from any shore. In an act off screen, Darwin is able to conjure a large African elephant to aid the masked bandit to land, because he is the only one that cannot swim. By employing underwater, aerial and level shots, Tarsem ably captures a scene of such ocular tranquility it can almost not be considered real, but instead somehow conjured up in the director’s mind, mystically projected onto the screen. Generously the movie is filled with these panoramic spectacles. There has never been a film like this, completely dedicating itself to having random outbursts of beauty in every scene, but never so much as to make a disturbance. The critic Roger Ebert said it best in his review: “You might want to see The Fall for no other reason than because it exists. There will never be another like it.”