Tarsem is known for his visuals, and indeed it was the trailer for The Fall that convinced to go see it on the big screen, despite my dislike of his first and only other film, The Cell, which was all style over substance. But I had read that The Fall was a labor of love that Tarsem had been working on for over a decade, and that the images were in service of a greater story. This is both true and untrue.

It’s true in the sense that it is a very intelligent film that happens to have beautiful visuals. It’s untrue in the sense that much of the time the beautiful visuals are clearly arbitrary, based on beautiful locations Tarsem happened upon while shooting commercials all over the world. But The Fall is meant to be a fictional story, not a sequel to Baraka (which is already in production anyway), and so I must evaluate it on those terms. And in that regard, The Fall is a qualified success as well, except for some pacing and structural problems that sometimes made me an impatient viewer.

Set in the 1930’s, the story is sort of a mix of The Wizard of Oz and Pan’s Labryinth, about a young immigrant girl (Catinca Untaru) convalescing in a Southern California hospital. She befriends a stuntman (Lee Pace) who was paralyzed in an on-set accident, and who begins to tell her a fantastical story about five heroes who band together to fight their mutual enemy, Governor Odious.

For reasons that are somewhat essential to the plot, the story is disorganized and capricious (e.g., Charles Darwin teaming up with a stereotyped Italian explosives expert and an ex-slave), which while consistent with the overall theme, leads to those pacing problems I mentioned above. The focus of the film is partly on how an intelligent young child with a limited grasp of English interpret stories in her mind, incorporating real elements in her life, and often misinterpreting basic elements (like imagining an Indian who lost his wigwam and “squaw” as the turbaned type from a land of grand palaces). And it’s partly about how the story is able to affect and sometimes manipulate the little girl, to whom who lives and dies in the story actually matters.

The premise of the film is responsible both for its good and not-so-good qualities, yet in the week or so since I saw the film, the not-so-good qualities have declined in importance and my opinion of the film has improved.

One last thing I enjoyed: The Fall is tangentially about early Hollywood filmmaking, and Tarsem includes two great montages in the film, one about limb amputations, and the other about falling stuntmen. I hereby nominate Tarsem to be the montage editor of the next Academy Awards ceremony.