The Fall

I receive a text from Jake saying that he would like to come over “& hang” on Friday night, & that he would bring a movie that he wants us to see. I work a 12 hour day, starting at 4:30am, on Thursdays, & then get up & repeat this again on Fridays. I am sometimes of no use on Friday evenings, but Jake is cute, urbane, smart, & witty. Who am I to say I am too tired?

Unbelievable, but I decided to for go whiskey so that I would stay keen for the film. This was a good choice. Jake had decided to introduce the Husband & me to something called- The Fall. Produced by David Fincher & Spike Jonze, this visually stunning & audacious movie grabbed me from the opening credits. The Fall was shot in 18 countries, over 4 years, during breaks from the cast & crew’s other projects. The Fall is a big dash of The Princess Bride, with a generous sprinkling of The Wizard Of Oz, & like those films, it is neither precious, darling, nor twee. There is a through line of deep melancholy & dysphoria to the entire enterprise, & yet there a very droll, waggish & original moments.

An amazing & hallucinatory black & white credits sequence starts the film with a bold juxtaposition of reality & dreamscape. Set in a stylized early 20th century Hollywood at the birth of motion pictures, we meet Alexandria, the daughter of immigrants. She works the Californian orange groves with her family & has recently suffered a bad fall, breaking her arm. While running about the hospital, with her arm in cast, she meets stuntman Roy, played by Lee Pace, who also had a bad fall & may be permanently damaged, but already is, in several ways. Roy starts to tell Alexandria a fantastic story about an Indian (the unspoken disagreement over his ethnicity gives the film it’s best, &perfectly underplayed joke) , a former slave, an explosives expert, a mystic, a masked bandit & Charles Darwin (complete with a sidekick monkey), all who pledged to end the life of the evil Governor Odious. Roy will keep telling the story, but he needs a little favor from Alexandria in return...

Pace is utterly believable as Roy, setting up a story so that the young listener can fill in the visual details with the things she is familiar with. Child actor-Catinca Untaru is a revelation as Alexandria. She & Pace share scenes that are so honest & natural; it is hard to believe they were completely scripted. Because they are so natural, the preposterous adventure/fantasy storyline is allowed come & go as it wishes. The story within the story is inconsistent, weird & occasionally hilarious.


The director-Tarsem, his art director & design team provide a visual experience, the likes of which I have rarely seen in a film. This is not a Peter Jackson/James Cameron experience. There are no CGs. He shot the film all over the world so he could bring real world locations that look like they simply must be fake: the orange sands where Alexander the Great is stranded, the labyrinth of despair,& the mad staircase ridden city that forms part of the final battle…they are all jaw-droppingly stunning. There is a scene where Alexander & his men are framed so that they stand in the lower right hand corner of the screen, just an inch tall. Behind them & engulfing the rest of the screen is nothing but orange sand rising into the sky. Other images that stayed with me included a stone maze within a castle, a tiny island visited by a swimming elephant; the cityscape painted blue, all look surprisingly unified in their beauty. This film is filled with audacious, lush, & inventive images.

I kept dreaming the movie after I went to be last night & the images are staying with me. I give The Fall a B+ on the Steve Movie Report Card. Put it in your queue, & let me know what you think.