(If you loved The Neverending Story, The Princess Bride, and The Wizard of Oz, you should escape the heat and go see this asap!)
If Salvador Dali was alive today and was also a movie director/producer, he probably would have made something very similar to The Fall.
Director Tarsem (Singh), whose work mostly consists of commercials and music videos (most notably REM’s “Losing My Religion”), has breathed air into a dazzling dream world, saturated in eye-spraining colors and stunning visuals—an unchartered landscape where tangled tree roots take the form of a thickly-dreadlocked man; where elephants swim in turquoise waters among humans; where a man’s scream is muffled by a cascade of flapping birds that soar from his gaping mouth. The Fall is a plunge into a mythical place on the edge of the world, or maybe even a different world entirely.
Alexandria (Catinca Untaru) is doughy-cheeked cherub, a five year old girl who roams the empty halls of a Los Angeles hospital in the (presumably) 1920s, her broken arm in an uncomfortably angled cast. After sharing her stolen communion wafers from the hospital chapel, she easily befriends the bed-ridden, handsome but weary Roy (Lee Pace), a silent movie stuntman who is recovering from his recent paralysis and gravely broken heart. Inspired by this endearing snaggle-toothed bandit, he promises her a magical story, if she will smuggle him some morphine pills from the hospital dispensary.
The tale he unravels is of himself as the Black Bandit, a Zorro-like warrior with a painful past. He and the rest of his clan are an elaborately costumed five some –the bomb-lined, trench coat-wearing Italian firecracker Luigi; Otta, the devastatingly sculpted ex-slave in a horned Egyptian headdress; the devilishly eye browed Indian widow; and the fresh-faced, monkey-toting Charles Darwin in pink-spotted fur. Like a band of superheroes, each with their own special power and distinguishing costume color, the group seeks to avenge the evil Governor Odious, who wronged them and then left them all for dead on a deserted island.
As we are sucked back into the hospital ward, the dual storylines entwine. Roy’s morphine pills start to take effect, and he slowly deteriorates, until the two universes have finally become one swirling, chaotic mess. It’s at this point when we realize that Alexandria has control over the story, and always has, funneling the suicidal Roy’s words beyond the hospital bed and into the open terrain of her imagination. The everyday people around her —the ice delivery man, the one-legged patient, the nurse with the heart of gold— all become the characters in the other world, which makes the five year old girl’s extraordinary imagination even more believable. As the mayhem in the hospital and the turmoil in the story become indistinguishable, it is up to Alexandria to save this story from its rapid and inevitable fall.
