The Fall

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“FOUR STARS (out of four): 

“Tarsem’s ‘The Fall’ is a mad folly, an extravagant visual orgy, a free-fall from reality into uncharted realms. Surely it is one of the wildest indulgences a director has ever granted himself… a movie that you might want to see for no other reason than because it exists.  There will never be another like it.” -Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun-Times

At the center of this rapturous fever dream of a film is a child listening to a story. She is a 5-year-old immigrant girl convalescing with a broken arm after falling from a tree while picking oranges. Set at a Los Angeles hospital in the 1920s, the child befriends a silent-movie stuntman with paralyzed legs and a broken heart. In exchange for undercover deliveries of morphine, he spins her a tale. That story involves a band of five heroes led by the Black Bandit, a princely African slave, a swami, an explosives expert, and the naturalist Charles Darwin, all tilting at an evil Governor Odious who has imprisoned them.

Not just one of the most visually stunning films ever put to celluloid, the story behind the making of this self-funded film is just as incredible. Tarsem intentionally had no script, just a vision: that his 5-year-old actress would ad lib with actor Lee Pace, on camera, to structure a fantastical adventure fable… and then he would go around the world to shoot, on location, the story that was created by the two actors. To do that,  he strategically took commercial directing gigs around the world (as the top commercial director working, he was able to choose his own locations), keeping the crew and equipment after hours and bringing his actors out to shoot scenes for THE FALL. That’s how we end up with the miracle of a self-financed film shot over four years (!) on location in 24 countries, in some of the most extraordinary locations across the globe. Unconvinced by the CGI work in his previous film, THE CELL, Tarsem insisted on only practical effects and real-life locations.  There is legendarily not a single CGI or green screen shot in the film, aside from three fades between locations.  It’s incredible to behold.

There are very few finer big-screen experiences.