The Fall (4 1/2 stars)
Directed by Tarsem. Written by Dan Gilroy, Nico Soultanakis, and Tarsem Singh. With Lee Pace, Catinca Untaru, Justine Waddell, Kim Uylenbroek, Robin Smith, Jeetu Verma, Leo Bill, and Marcus Wesley. (R)
Tarsem Singh Dhabdwar, the Indian-born director who goes by the more spare and enigmatic handle Tarsem, is not a man afraid of taking chances. After an early move to Iran, he went against his father's wishes and enrolled in an American film school, where he honed the skills he later put to use making music videos for Suzanne Vega and R.E.M., and stylish commercials for the likes of Levi.
His commercial work paid well—along the way, he also made the Jennifer Lopez trifle The Cell—and Tarsem tucked his millions away, biding his time until he could make the film he wanted to make. The Fall, a stunningly beautiful, endlessly inventive piece of work, is that film. Filled with brilliant color, suffused with the magic of storytelling, it's an homage to the power of imagination, and its own proof. It's also the best film I've seen so far this year.
The story—I'll get to that in a moment—only begins after a lush opening sequence that recalls the silvery work of Ansel Adams crossed with the grit of Robert Frank's classic photo series The Americans. A man erupts from a river, gasping. Above him, a gleaming train is stopped on a bridge, steam pouring from its stack. A leg lies in shallow water, a harpoon lodged in its meat. As the score rises, a horse, water pouring off its mane, is pulled up from the depths. It's an arresting mix of images that says one thing: there's a story here.
The film switches to color, and picks up in a dilapidated Los Angeles hospital during the 1910s. Roy (Lee Pace) is a stuntman in the early motion picture business, making a living by falling off horses and taking high dives. His last job didn't end well—that was him in the river—and he can't feel his legs. As nurses and doctors bustle around him, few seem to take notice of his fellow patient Alexandria (Catinca Untaru), an inquisitive young girl who's recovering from a broken arm. Wherever she goes, she carries a box of her most precious mementos—a photo of her family and those small bits of ephemera that mean so much to lonely children.
When she finds company in Roy, he begins to weave a story from the bits of history she keeps there, but one that will come to include much of himself as well. Though the tale is Roy's, it's Alexandria who imagines what it looks like, and that is the story within the story that makes Tarsem's film such a wonder as it moves from the dim light of the hospital to the blazing beauty of its exotic locales. Tarsem shot in nearly 30 countries to get the locations he wanted, and the film is entirely free of digital effects—an amazing feat when you see what he comes up with. At the same time, it seems right; there's none of the obvious fakery of CGI on display here. Instead, it all has the tinge of magic that comes from seeing the impossible made real before your eyes.
The story Roy tells—a mix of old adventure serials, Greek myth and comic book action—involves five men's fight against the evil Governor Odious. The characters include an ex-slave, an Italian explosives expert, an Indian swordsman, a masked bandit, and Charles Darwin. All have a reason to want Odious dead, and they band together to achieve that end, escaping from their island prison with the help of swimming elephants. In its mix of characters and fantastic settings, it also recalls Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, but without the surreal comedy that often keeps Gilliam's films—however great—from tugging at the heart.
As the adventure goes on, coming to include a princess, a palace in the middle of a lake, and a Labyrinth of Despair, it becomes clear that Roy is really telling a story of his own, one of love lost. Overheard snatches of conversation hint at a love triangle between Roy, the leading man in the film he's been working on, and the leading lady. Paralyzed and hopeless, he manipulates Alexandria into becoming a bandit herself to steal for him the morphine he needs to end his life, only to have his plans turned inside out when the theft goes very, very wrong. When the man without hope and the girl without family compete to end the tale on their own terms, the film approaches heartbreak.
The story may sound familiar—tales of love and revenge are as old as The Iliad and The Odyssey, and have been retold in the likes of The Count of Monte Cristo—but once again, Tarsem's visual expertise cannot be underestimated. For all its lineage, The Fall is entirely its own beast, and it's a wondrous animal. Go see this film.
The Happening (3 stars)
Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan. With Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, John Leguizamo, and Ashlyn Sanchez. (R)
The Happening, the new film from M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense, The Village) has been advertised with an odd tagline—it's most often hyped as the director's "first R-rated film." Why that should be a selling point is something I've puzzled over; the spookiness of The Sixth Sense wasn't undermined by a lack of gore, and, in general, the director's output has been marked by a thoughtful approach to genre (mystery, fantasy, horror, sci-fi—he's drawn on all of them) that relies more on the imagination of the viewer than anything onscreen. This new film, by contrast, relies more on the artsy bloodletting of a new wave of zombie films led by the likes of 28 Days Later.
Shyamalan's story is about a new plague, one that comes in on the wind. Central Park is ground zero, and when the film begins, the bustle of New York is stilled as people suddenly begin acting strangely—stopping in their tracks like a giant piece of performance art—before killing themselves however they can. A woman stabs herself in the neck, and construction workers rain from roofs in Manhattan like frogs in a Bible story.
In Philadelphia, high-school science teacher Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) is telling his students about colony collapse disorder—the phenomenon of disappearing bees—and the consequences it could have for the human race. A phony quote attributed to Einstein on his blackboard states that when the bees are gone, the human race will only have four years left on earth—a handy way to tell us what's coming next.
As word of what's happened in New York reaches the city, Elliot makes plans to evacuate Philly with his depressed wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel), fellow teacher Julian (John Leguizamo), and Julian's daughter Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez), but the train they're on is stopped at a lonely outpost in rural Pennsylvania, where a conductor explains that they've lost contact "with everyone" and that all the passengers are on their own. A bit unbelievably, Julian decides to head off to New Jersey to track down his wife, leaving his daughter with Elliot and Alma. Is this what parents do in the face of a nameless threat to their children?
With Julian gone, the trio hook up with a pair of hot-dog loving horticulturists who have an intriguing idea about what's happening. It's the plants, they explain—fed up with our intrusion on their habitat, they've evolved, giving off toxic emissions that turn our brains against ourselves. It's as good an explanation as any, and for the rest of the film the gentle rustling of leaves in the breeze takes on a new and sinister tone. If you live in a rural area, driving home from the theater will be an experience—The Happening does for trees what Jaws did for the ocean.
As the dwindling group of survivors moves further into the countryside, the deaths mount and the film gets more and more grisly. Here, that R rating comes into play in earnest as we're confronted with all manner of suicide: people hanging over a tree-lined street like so many holiday decorations, multiple shootings, and a man who fires up an industrial mower and calmly lies down in its path to become mulch. Shyamalan doesn't seem suited for depicting such carnage, and it shows; his tableaus of death are overly pretty things, even when they shock. He can't help but want it to look good, and when he does let it get raw—showing a zookeeper who offers his arms to some lions—it looks ridiculous; instead of the thrashing, violent death one might expect, the keeper's arms pop off like icicles from a branch.
As the man at the center of it all, Wahlberg is solid in a generic role. Deschanel, though, is off her form, and her Alma is bland and irritating for most of the film until a late and wordless scene, where a closeup of her face reveals what she could have done if she had a bit more to work with—it's really a remarkable bit of acting, conveying a wide range of emotion all in the space of a few seconds, and one wishes Shyamalan hadn't relegated her to being little more than a damsel in distress. For all its failings, the overall effect of The Happening is still an unsettling one, albeit one that dissipates quickly in the sunshine.
Bigger, Stronger, Faster (2 stars)
Directed by Chris Bell. Written by Chris Bell, Alex Buono, and Tamsin Rawady. With Chris Bell, Mark Bell, Mike Bell, Rosemary Bell, and Sheldon Bell. (PG-13)
In brief: Bigger, Stronger, Faster is a documentary that borrows heavily from the Michael Moore school of filmmaking, featuring a director/narrator who makes himself the heart of the story. The subject this time is America's love affair with steroids, and how it has impacted the family of director Chris Bell.
Bell and his two brothers are weight-lifting jocks who dreamed of lives as professional wrestlers in the Hulk Hogan mold. While Chris can't bring himself to take steroids, his brothers do, and one of them (Mike "Mad Dog" Bell) even has a brief career as the kind of wrestler paid to get beaten. "I was born to attain greatness," says Mad Dog, but his dreams seem to be running out of time.
As a director, Chris Bell is run of the mill. He seems unsure of the film he wants to make, and spends a lot of time stringing together montages of old Schwarzenegger and Stallone clips to make simple points about our country's obsession with muscular heroes. Still in awe of his old heroes, he doesn't quite have the objectivity the film calls for, so often comes off like a man in search of an excuse. In one of the film's better scenes, where steroid foe Representative Henry Waxman shows himself ignorant of the laws controlling the substances, he almost finds one.
Correction: Kung Fu Panda should have been rated 3 1/2 stars in last week's review.
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com.
