Summary
In a hospital, an injured stuntman weaves an epic tale for a young girl with a broken arm in order to convince her to help him obtain the Morphine he needs to numb his inner anguish.
My Thoughts
As often seems to happen, some strange confluence of forces weaves its way through the film scene every once in a while and taps into some zeitgeist or commonality within studios, filmmakers, and writers to create two similar movies releasing nearly at the same moment. “Dante’s Peak” and “Volcano,” “Skyscraper” and “Rampage”, and “Armageddon” and “Deep Impact” to name some of the more prominent examples.
Here’s a strange one, though, that I had no clue of until I saw “The Fall” and realized its remarkable similarity to “Pan’s Labyrinth.” Both are films in which a young girl is swept up in circumstances she doesn’t understand, cut off from her parents, and finds solace in a fantasy world, and best of all, they are both beautiful films with great acting and emotional moments which will truly move the audience.
The film opens with some beautiful slow-motion black and white shots of what looks like an old west scene on a bridge with a train and team of men trying to haul something up out of the water in the river below. It turns out that this is actually a movie set but a real rescue of a stunt actor who has taken a fall.
Roy (Lee Pace, “Guardians of the Galaxy”), the stuntman, meets a young immigrant girl, named Alexandria, who is in the same hospital as him, with a broken arm. The young man befriends her and begins telling her an Epic tale by which she is quickly entranced to the extent that he can convince her to steal Morphine for him in exchange for more story. It seems that Roy’s intentions to overdose into suicide are completely over her head and that the story is doomed to end in tragedy.
From the opening moments of the film to the connection between Roy and Alexandria to the strength they both find in each others love and stories, I was hopelessly in love with this movie, beginning to end.
To begin with, the visuals are stunning. Not only do we have a 1920s hospital, film crew, and movie stars captured in all their ragged and pompous reality, we get a fantasy realm imagined by a little girl that could not feel more exotic and far flung if you were a child of the same era reading “1001 Arabian Nights” yet woven with childlike simplicity and earnestness throughout. The stunning production design and costuming are most likely the thing that would have made this movie jump off the video store shelf at you were you to happen upon it.
The acting, while somewhat ho-hum form Lee Pace, is counteracted by a brilliant performance from Catinca Untaru who plays Alexandria. Her eyes of excitement and hope, delighted squees, and pleading tears are the heart of a movie that could otherwise have been termed as style over substance. There are wonderful themes at work in this film but it all would fall flat without this one little girl who has never been in anything else of note. In fact I would say that the heroine in this film is far more compelling than the one in “Pan’s Labyrinth.”
The themes of the film are less than focused but not in a way that seems aimless. It seems more that they are surfacing for air every once in a while and we see them in more obvious way but they are always swimming underneath the surface of whatever scene, whether in the real world or in the Epic tale. Of course, there are themes of love’s redeeming power for those who are broken but also the power of story to lift the human spirit which has been bruised.
As a cinephile, I especially appreciated the not to cinema’s power to immortalize even if it was a bit heavy handed. I’m sure not lovers of cinema would find it to be a strange way to end a film but then, if you aren’t a lover of movies, you probably wouldn’t be watching this film or reading this review.
I definitely would describe this movie as fitting into that category of film I am always on the lookout for. Films that are beautiful yet true in their depiction of hardship and pain are rare and even more so are films which do so in such a way that seeks to elevate the human spirit itself from the doldrums of what we call normal life into those brief moments wherein we glimpse something less tangible than the simple realities which confront us day to day.
Film has a tremendous power to hint at the expanse of the human interior which we so often neglect not only in each other but in ourselves as well. This film accomplishes this spectacularly whether you identify more with a little girl pleading for a hurting man to not give up or with a man so hurt and broken that he sees no way forward this is a film that will have you believing that there is another chapter to the story and one worth writing, at that.
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