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Tarsem's film falls flat

PROVIDED/ROADHOUSE

Another dramatic landscape behind a scene from the art-house fantasy film, “The Fall.”

Before being seduced by the trailer for "The Fall," admittedly a captivating one, remember the film is directed by Tarsem, the singularly named and singularly irksome perpetrator of 2000's "The Cell," as empty an exercise as could be imagined.

For all its arresting visuals and exotic locations, this contemporary fairy tale is little more than a two-hour music video: a pretentious parade of pretty pictures punctuated by sepia-toned grimness. How a movie can be so exceptionally cinematic yet interminably dull is a puzzle. Never mind that it is "presented" by a pair of vastly superior talents in David Fincher and Spike Jonze.

"The Fall" is as incoherent in story as it is pictorially clever, with fantasy sequences lashed by ludicrous dialogue and operatic acting.

Tarsem (real name, Tarsem Singh) obviously possesses an imaginative visual sense. It's substance that eludes — or doesn't interest — him. If this is art, as some proclaim, it is art of a very shallow and debased variety.

Scene: a Los Angeles hospital in the 1920s. An injured movie stuntman is telling an "epic tale of love and revenge" to a broken-armed child who also suffered her injury in a fall. It is a fable of five quixotic heroes on a quest to kill an evil governor named Odious. Every day when little Alexandra (Catinca Untaru) visits his bedside, Roy (Lee Pace) adds new embroidery to the tale, editing it to suit her preferences.

The five are a masked bandit (Emil Hostina), a ex-slave warrior (Marcus Wesley), a widowed East Indian (Jeetu Verma), an Italian demolition man (Robin Smith), and a rather colorful Charles Darwin (Leo Bill). As the quintet romp through desert landscapes and spectacular Indo-Islamic palaces, their steps are dogged by the governor's minions, black-garbed fiends out of "Amadeus" who block their every move.

There's a touch of "The Princess Bride" to this back-and-forth between mundane present and fanciful past, but little of the wit. No, Tarsem prefers his adult fantasies dark and bloody. Roy has hidden motives. Lovesick and depressed, he's determined to take his life, and, through story, callously manipulates Alexandra to act as his unwitting agent. This intriguing device is "The Fall's" principal feature of interest, but it plays out in a vacuum.

Filmed, pointlessly, over four years in 18 countries, "The Fall" was a 15-year labor of love for its director. We're told it took years to cast, baffling given the blandness of Pace's performance (until deepening, too little, too late, at the very end) and the one-dimensional caricatures of the rest. Child actor Untaru has gobs of charm, but her English is so hard to decipher at times that one may miss "significant" plot elements.

Doubtless, Tarsem believes his film to be a kind of homage, and some aspects of it genuinely are, like his black-and-white tribute to the great early film stunts of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, et al., framed in the opening and closing credits. Yet in the end, "The Fall" is merely a eye-popping waste of time.

Reach Bill Thompson at 937-5707.

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