WARNING: This Netflix Diary contains spoilers that will spoil you like sour cream that’s been sitting in the sun. Only read if you don’t care about this.
The Fall is so unique and crazy that it defies normal movie reviews. Director Tarsem Singh has created a visual and emotional feast whose effectiveness depends entirely on one’s answer to two questions: 1) Do you like huge, spectacular natural sets and over-the-top visual artistry? and, 2) Does the relationship between the main characters — a suicidal stuntman and a 5-year-old girl — resonate with you emotionally? In my case, the answer to both questions is a resounding “yes,” but then again, I like weird stuff.
Some people have compared The Fall to The Princess Bride, but the only thing the two movies share is a framing device. In Bride, we don’t care about Peter Falk or that stupid kid; we just want to find out if the Dred Pirate Roberts gets the girl. In The Fall, the story is imaginative, but clearly being made up on the spot by the stuntman and imagined onscreen by both him and the little girl. It looks super-cool (and without it, this movie would admittedly be a depressing 45-minute dirge that would have no reason to exist), but as Homer Simpson would say, “There is no moral. It’s just a bunch of stuff that happened.” This is probably what makes The Fall so divisive. People want the fantasy story part of it to have the amazing ending that’s promised by its epic scale, and the film turns out to be just about a suicidal guy telling a story to a girl so she’ll bring him pills. Although it eeks out some good feelings at the very end, the vast majority of both narratives is unrelentingly bleak. So you can see why I like it.
Another potential point of divisiveness is the performance of the little girl, a foreign non-actor who mumbles and does all sorts of other things that broadcast the fact that she’s a real girl and not really acting. I’m going to submit that this dose of reality helps the film a ton, because it turns it from a standard manufactured Hollywood drama into something unlike any other movie before it. She’s such a real presence that she forces all the other actors to play “real” with her. This makes the whole thing kind of charming — but also really strange. And when the end comes and she figures out that he wants to kill himself and that the epic tale he’s spinning from his own life is going to end in tragedy, her tears and protests are too unskilled to feel trite. I can see how someone who’s really happy would still find the story boring and lame, but don’t listen to them. About anything.
P.S. — The woman who looks like a Bond girl that plays the nurse/princess has a really weird voice. I have nothing besides that to say about her. Also, one can tell this film was made by the same guy who made The Cell. Tarsem really likes horned helmets and giant Martian-looking outdoor locations.
