by Greg Kaczynski

Created on: April 30, 2008

The Fall is Broken

A handsome, ripe Hollywood star (Lee Pace of Pushing Daisies), confined to a hospital bed because of a terrible stunt injury uses an epic story full of wild imagery and larger-than-life characters to manipulate a crippled innocent immigrant girl (newcomer Catinca Untaru) to fetch morphine for him to kill himself; it sounds like a fairly engaging story. It sounds like the kind of story that, while the story that the Hollywood gentleman shares with the girl is tantalizing, the drama that ensues between himself and the little girl would be even more thrilling. As expected, however, director Tarsem Singh errs on the side of being too extravagant, leaving his actors and story behind to fend for themselves in his second feature, The Fall.

The biggest flaw of this film is simply that there is no investment at all in any of these characters. When the film opens, we know it's in Los Angeles, we know that there's been a terrible accident (well, we can guess), and we assume that the guy in the bed is the guy from accident. However, we have no idea who he is. Throughout the film, we find out his girlfriend left him for the leading man, but we don't really know who she is either, so it ultimately doesn't matter.

To make things worse, Alexandria, his co-star, has double trouble. First of all, she shares the same problem within the writing: we have no idea who she is, nor do we really care. She's introduced as a weirdly imaginative broken-English speaking little girl who randomly throws notes out of her bedroom window. The people of the hospital seem to know who she is, but for no known reason; she's a cute little girl, but nothing separates her from all of the other cute little girls.

In most other films, this is where the writing or the acting take charge and the character comes forth as a ray of light and the audience falls in love or at least feels connected to her. The writing falls flat because there's nothing of any substance there, and the acting is utterly absent because the little girl playing Alexandria is not an actress.

Tarsem claims that he wanted to utilize not only an unknown to play Alexandria, but a non-actor child so that he could capture the innocence and genuine reactions of a true five year-old in this situation. This tactic backfires, however, in that Untaru, while adorable as she is, is unable to carry a narrative. At times she mumbles, other times, she drops non-sequiturs that Pace has to awkwardly address, occasionally more than

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