More than the eye can hold

If Terry Gilliam ever remade The Wizard of Oz (and you know he’s thought about it), it might look like Tarsem Singh’s The Fall. But not only did Singh beat him to the punch, he outdid him as well with a film that attempts to capture the imaginative process of a child.

In 1915, Roy (Lee Pace, the piano-playing swain in Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day), a young stuntman in the fledgling movie business, lies in a hospital bed outside of Los Angeles. At a time when cameramen are eager to record bigger and more spectacular stunts for audiences to whom visual stories are still new, men like Roy are encouraged to take more dangerous risks. This one went awry, and he may never walk again. Even worse, his girlfriend has run off with the actor he was doubling for. As Roy sees it, he doesn’t have a lot to live for.

Five-year-old Alexandria (Catinca Untaru), a child of immigrants, will heal much faster, having broken her arm in a fall from an orange tree. For the time being, though, she’s bored in this place. When change brings her to Roy’s room one afternoon, he tries to entertain her with a story about her namesake, the warrior Alexander the Great. Seeing that she’s not very interested, he concocts a fantasy tale more to her liking, one involving pirates, a captive princess, and her absent father.

Roy’s story, told over a period of days, changes with his moods. It also changes with Alexandria’s moods, as he adjusts it based on his perceptions of her interest and excitement. He needs to keep her interested, because he needs her help: He plans to have her steal enough morphine from the hospital pharmacy so that he can end his own life.

Lee Pace in The Fall

There’s one more story going on here: the one that Alexandra hears, and which we see visualized on screen. Just as readers of a book will often visualize the characters in ways that may even run counter to the author’s vision, Alexandra, whose English is still uncertain, uses her perceptions to take in Roy’s story. When he uses the word “Indian,” he means a figure that might be seen in one of the cowboy movies he made, but she imagines a dark-skinned warrior from the subcontinent of Asia. Other people from the hospital start to take roles within the story, and inevitably so do Roy and Alexandra.

Tarsem (as he credits himself onscreen) made a name for himself in the commercial and music video industry (he directed REM’s “Losing My Religion” clip.) His first feature was the dazzling Jennifer Lopez horror film The Cell. But The Fall is the movie he has wanted to make since the early 1990s, and he’s spent a large part of that time working on it.

Adapting the obscure Bulgarian film (if that’s not a redundant phrase I don’t know what is) Yo Ho Ho, Tarsem spent years scouting locations while he was shooting commercials and videos around the world. Officially he shot in 18 countries, though in one interview he says it was at least 24. And like Orson Welles in his later days, he funded the film himself, shooting piecemeal when he could raise the money, over a period of four years. Everything that is splendid and compelling to look at in this film is real—there is no computer-generated imagery (although Tarsem admits to some cosmetic digital corrections.)

Of course, this is not how movies are supposed to get made, and Tarsem has met with resistance getting it into the marketplace. It’s been nearly two years since it was shown at the Toronto Film Festival in 2006, and it arrives from one of the smaller independent distributors. (Directors David Fincher and Spike Jonze, who have had their own experience with trying to get their work to audiences, have lent their names to The Fall to help it get exposure.)

I can’t imagine that all of the billions of dollars Hollywood has spent on its summer blockbusters will do as much to take your breath away as this single film, a joyous if mad act of will that I can imagine watching again and again.

By all means take the family to see it. There is some violence that may upset young children, particularly as it relates to likeable characters; they also may have trouble with Roy’s desire to kill himself. That said, the fact that The Fall comes to theaters with an “R” rating strikes me as one of the more stupid of the many, many stupid decisions the MPAA has made in its failed mission to “educate” parents about the content of movies. Look at this film, then go see the PG-13 Adam Sandler comedy You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, which contains violence, nudity, and abundant sexual content, and then explain to me how any parent can be expected to take the ratings seriously.