The Fall

This weekend I was lucky enough to see The Fall. This is the best movie released so far in 2008--hands down. Hopefully you will recognize Ned the pie maker (Lee Pace) of Pushing Daisies fame. If not, you need to check out the best new show of last year, which will be returning next season with new episodes. In The Fall, Pace plays Roy, a bed ridden silent picture stuntman who has lost his will to live. In the hospital he meets a little girl (played brilliantly as a realistic child, not a movie kid) with a broken arm. To convince her to run errands for him, he tells her an epic story of five men in search of revenge.

Half of the movie takes place in the real world hospital, and the other half in the imagination of Alexandria, the little girl. Tarsem's use of color and scope in the imagination sequences reminded me of Yimou Zhang's work in Hero--which is a huge compliment. By the way, the director Tarsem Singh seems to have dropped his last name since his debut on The Cell. The visuals in the story are simply gorgeous, but the emotions in the real world portions are just as poignant. The themes of the real and imaginary stories merge toward the end in a really heart breaking way.

Roy and Alexandria are brilliant together. According to Tarsem, they made Catinca Untaru, the actress playing Alexandria, believe Pace was really paralyzed during the entire film shoot. The young actress did not speak English when they began filming, so it was up to Pace to play off of her jumbled deliveries. The Fall was filmed two years ago, before his breakthrough on Pushing Daisies, and I'm sure we can plan on seeing a lot more of Lee Pace in the coming years.

The "story within a story that helps understand the real world characters better" idea was used phenomenally by Guillermo del Toro in Pan's Labyrinth a couple years ago. Tarsem uses the device a little differently in the case of The Fall. Because Roy is telling the story and Alexandria is interpreting in her own mind, their images do not match up exactly (as in the case of the Indian). Also, the story is fluid, so a father character can become Roy after her suggestion.

By the way, if you missed Pan’s Labyrinth, it’s on Blu-ray; check it out now. The Fall is a remake of a 1981 Bulgarian movie called Yo Ho Ho, which is currently unavailable on DVD in the US.