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Film
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Enthralled by The Fall
David Fincher and Spike Jonze are to be congratulated for trying to help bring attention of a film our critic thinks is the best of the year so far.
Monday, May 12, 2008 at 3:10 PM
By Brett Buckalew
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Roadside Attractions
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As many music video directors have been unfortunate enough to discover, a talent for matching vivid imagery and hyperkinetic edits to the rhythm and tone of a specific song is not one that always carries over gracefully to the realm of feature filmmaking. Visual trickery and enough cuts to shame a Benihana chef can provide quite a rush in a five-minute time span, but when stretched out to two hours without any careful modulation and refinement, the music-video aesthetic can be exhausting to endure.
Anyone who’s sat through the film work of music video veterans Joseph Kahn (Torque), Dominic Sena (Swordfish, Gone in 60 Seconds) and Jonas Åkerlund (whose Spun, according to the Internet Movie Database, holds the record for the most edits in a feature film, at over 5,000 - not something to be proud of) can attest to this. As for those who consider Michael Bay to be Satan incarnate - a flock I’m not really a part of, for the record - they, much like Albert Brooks flustered over the component parts of the phrase “nest egg” in Lost in America, probably don’t want to hear the words “music” and “video” conjoined in the same sentence ever again.
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Roadside Attractions
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But there’s no denying that the act of conjuring up the perfect visual correlative for a pre-recorded song requires a rich imagination, which means that when a director transitions from the MTV training ground to the big screen with the intention of respecting the distinctive properties of cinema, the results of splashing that well-honed imagination up on a larger canvas can be breathtaking. And since a feature-length narrative is one of the new tools that music video directors get to play around with when they graduate to film, it’s not surprising that some of the best movies made by music video veterans demonstrate a fascination with story comparable to the curiosity with which a child regards his first set of Legos.
Whether it’s Nicolas Cage’s screenwriter grappling with how to turn a book about orchids into a viable script in Spike Jonze’s Adaptation, or Jake Gyllenhaal’s cartoonist piecing together a string of clues and assumptions into a theoretical solution to a serial killer case in Zodiac, the protagonists of these films get a near electrical charge out of forming narratives from disparate scraps, and that charge proves to be infectious. As it happens, Fincher and Jonze have now thrown their clout behind The Fall, the second film from Tarsem, an Indian-born stylist who first gained acclaim for his unforgettable music video for R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” (and who prefers to go without his surname of “Singh”).
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Roadside Attractions
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The credits list Fincher and Jonze as “presenting” the film, which essentially means they’re using their cultural cachet to help the film find an audience. Based solely on Tarsem’s film debut, the high-toned slasher flick The Cell, he seems a somewhat unlikely choice for two artistic heavyweights to get behind. Sure, his outré, nightmarish images enlivened a by-the-numbers yarn, but he seemed to regard story as little more than a clothesline to dangle those images from.
Part of what makes The Fall such a wonderful surprise, not to mention the best movie of the year so far by a wide mile, is how it expresses certain profound, human truths about the art of storytelling. More than merely justifying Fincher and Jonze’s endorsement with this sophomore effort, Tarsem proves to be even more dazzled by the primal power of film narrative than either of those estimable forebears.
He also manages the rather impressive task of making The Cell appear in hindsight to be a warm-up act for a major auteur, by taking themes and motifs from that debut (the notion of one person rescuing another from a perilous state of limbo; heavy baptismal symbolism) and expanding on them here, to greater effect.
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The figure suspended in limbo in The Fall is Roy Walker (Lee Pace), a stuntman recuperating from an on-set tumble in a hospital who pines, painfully, for an ex-girlfriend who has recently left him for the matinee star he was doubling for. Not dead, but hardly alive emotionally, Roy is one day visited serendipitously by Alexandria (Catinca Untaru), a five-year-old patient from another ward whose past is also marked with trauma, but who perseveres optimistically in the way children magically seem to.
Roy regales new pal Alexandria with an epic, wondrous tale of adventure and heroism. When he does so, Tarsem cuts from the mundane confines of the hospital to the sweeping vistas of Roy’s fantasy world, where the Black Bandit (also Pace) leads a quartet of outcasts wronged by the appropriately named warlord Governor Odious (Daniel Caltagirone) on a mission of vengeance against Odious.
There’s no possible way of overstating how gorgeously Tarsem brings this story-within-the-story to visual life. His unbridled imagination and pre-CGI techniques recall the great fantasists who came to prominence in the ‘80s, such as Terry Gilliam, Tim Burton and Jim Henson. And some of his other methods are reminiscent of even more legendary antecedents - like David Lean, he composes his most stunning tableaux by shooting his actors in eye-catching natural locations (the cast and crew traveled to 18 countries for the production, according to the press notes) from the widest angle he can, and like cinema pioneer Georges Méliès, he delights in using simple trick edits to alter the direction the story evolves in.
That the story does evolve, very movingly, is what supports Tarsem’s visionary flourishes. It would be as dastardly as any of Governor Odious’ maneuverings to give away too many particulars of how Roy and Alexandria’s emerging friendship begins to manifest itself in Roy’s tale of the Black Bandit, but the key to the movie’s singular magic is in how the viewer comes to realize that the myth Roy is spinning is literally a matter of life-and-death in the real world. As Roy takes the story in a doomed, tragic direction, Alexandria interjects and pushes it towards hopefulness.
A question arises: is Roy telling the story to precipitate his own demise, or as one last, subconscious reach for salvation? What The Fall, a glistening model of fairy-tale economy, gets at is how fictional narratives - and, by extension, film narratives - allow us to indulge our darkest desires without falling into any existing abyss; they’re a necessary release. The film also positions narrative as a two-way street; the storyteller can impose all he or she wishes, but how the listener interprets is just as integral to a story’s overall fabric.
How spectators choose to interpret The Fall will be interesting to see. Cynics may scoff at the ostentatious stylization on display; truly, their loss. In retaining both the essential innocence and danger of the moviegoing experience - that which makes it a valuable recreational pursuit for one’s inner child - Tarsem has made one of the few films in recent years that feels built to endure for generations.
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