The Fall - Pretty Pictures

If Alejandro Jodorowsky had directed The Princess Bride, it would have turned out something like The Fall.  The tale of five heroes on a quest to save a princess and defeat the villain responsible for ruining their lives, as told by a depressed and suicidal movie stuntman to a little girl with a broken arm in a hospital circa 1920's Los Angeles, Tarsem's The Fall is pure visual spectacle with a giddy blend of humor and pathos that, like his previous movie, The Cell, opens your eyes to the possibilities of movies as moving paintings that other directors seem capable only of hinting at.

Because it is a story being told by an unreliable narrator, The Fall, to both my pleasure and annoyance, is able to shut down in the middle of an action sequence whenever the storyteller feels that's enough for the day, and it can double back on itself and correct any errors the storyteller makes.  This results in fits of stops and starts that drag the story on in places, but that is also part of the fun, because the little girl, like the audience, becomes fed up with the storyteller stopping during all the good parts and forgetting important details, like when one of the heroes lights a stick of dynamite at the beginning of the scene, yet it never explodes because the storyteller forgot about it.  A general popcorn audience may not get a kick out of this, but if you've ever written a term paper or a short story and only remembered that you left out a key piece of information after you hit print, then you'll appreciate it.

This movie isn't for a popcorn audience, anyway.  It's for people bored with the same old schtick.  It's perfect counter programing to a movie like Speed Racer, which is probably just as colorful but half as imaginative.  I love a movie once in awhile that takes me to an orange desert, a blue city, an island shaped like a butterfly, and M.C. Escher's dream castle, and still has time to show an elephant swimming and a man being birthed from a tree.

And the heroes are just as colorful as their surroundings.  They include an African slave, an Indian warrior, an Italian explosives expert, Charles Darwin, and the main hero, the Zorro-like Masked Bandit, who has had his love taken away from him by the evil Governor Odious, who holds her captive in the above pictured geographical anomaly.

Not only are the heroes culturally distinctive, but their costumes are just as varyingly exotic.

Created by Eiko Ishioka, who designed the costumes for the stage production of M. Butterfly and worked on The Cell and Bram Stoker's Dracula, and who could probably design one hell of a prom dress, the characters in The Fall get to walk around in costumes so ornamental I'd be afraid of getting dirt on them.  The Italian wear a yellow robe with flames down the back, the Indian is in green, the African in charcoal to match his skin, and Charles Darwin - well, he resembles a butterfly.  And the Masked Bandit, of course, wears black.

There is really no way to describe the creative visual splendor of this film.  It was in production for over two years and was filmed in 18 countries, and Tarsem funded the film out of his own pocket, so it is both a pet project and a labor of love, and for once, these are not detractors.

You would think that with all of the dedication to the physical beauty of the film, the human element would be lost.  Not so.  What begins merely as the story of a confined man passing the time of day by telling a colorful off-the-cuff story to a bored, precocious young girl becomes, secondly, a method for the man to bribe the little girl into stealing the medicine he needs.  She doesn't get the medicine, she doesn't get the next chapter of the tale.  But it goes deeper than that, as the girl's growing love for the characters (and, thus, the storyteller) becomes a catharsis for the storyteller to overcome the burden of his depression.

The climax both of the storyteller's tale and his real life struggle with his brimming desire to end his life culminates in a great emotional duel between the girl and the storyteller, and between the girl's heroic character (as she grafts herself into the story) and the Masked Bandit.  It is not merely if the Masked Bandit defeats Governor Odious, but if the girl can convince the storyteller to give himself, and his story, a happy ending.  Now that is something The Princess Bride did not have to contend with.

With The Fall, Tarsem once again proves himself a visual technician of uncontested superiority, but also a storyteller of surprising emotional compassion.  Hopefully, he won't wait so long before he gives us another film.