The Fall, the second feature from Tarsem Singh, the commercial-and-music-video director still probably best known for R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion", finally crawls into theaters this weekend, a couple of years after it was unveiled at the Toronto Film Festival. Singh's first movie was 2000's The Cell, an eye-popping, empty-headed thriller in which he deployed his elaborately detailed visual imagination to depict "the mind of a serial killer." (Turned out the poor guy had a Damien Hirst exhibition going on in there.) Like some other directors who made the leap from music videos to the big screen, Singh showed a faith in his own visual flash that was so intense and single-minded that it bordered on outright contempt for representational details and other essentials of basic storytelling: how else to explain the decision to cast Jennifer Lopez as a visionary scientist and Vince Vaughn as a morally stern FBI agent? Damned if The Fall, which is based on a screenplay credited to Singh, Dan Gilroy, and Nico Soultanakis, doesn't turn out to be a self-conscious tribute to the wonders of "storytelling." (It's based on a 1981 Bulgarian movie called Yo Ho Ho, which Singh has acknowledged in interviews but isn't mentioned in the credits.) Lee Pace, bedridden for much of the film yet showing more fire and ardor than he's gotten the chance to show on the cult TV series Pushing Daisies, plays a man lying in a hospital in 1915 Los Angeles and nursing a broken heart: he's been dumped by his girlfriend, who happens to be one of the nurses (Justine Waddell) for another man. The real center of the movie, and the main thing it really has going for it, is a Romanian girl named Catinca Untaru, who's eleven now but was about eight when the movie was shot. She plays a resident of the children's ward who keeps sneaking off to visit Pace, who tells her a story in order to earn her friendship and trust. His secret motive is to persuade her to steal him a dose of morphine strong enough that he can give himself an overdose and kick off.
As that last detail indicates, The Fall has a bellyful of mournful seriousness tucked inside its gleaming shell. It's an innocence versus experience story, with the lonely kid learning about the dark side of life from the self-pitying adult who devalues the gift of story by using it for manipulative purposes. (There might just be an allegory about Hollywood in there somewhere.) Singh puts his stamp on the sequences illustrating the story Pace tells, in which he appears as one of a group of gaudily photogenic heroes who have sworn vengeance on a cruel villain who's done them dirt--and who, inevitably, is played by the same actor (Daniel Caltagrione) who, in the "real world" scenes, plays the new lover of the perfidious nurse. These fantasy sequences, set in fairy-tale desert landscape, have the expected production-design glitter, and even a few traces of wit. (Pace describes one of the heroes as an "Indian", and from his references to the fellow's squaw and wigwam, it clear that he means the Native American kind, but the little girl pictures a swaggering, bearded dude in a green turban and robe.) But the fantasy heroics that the little girl--and the audience--are made to look forward to don't really arrive. Sighe is more interested in playing postmodern games about how Pace's depressed state affects the quality of his storytelling and how the details of the real world leak into the fictional one, as well as with the misery experienced by the characters in the "real world" storyline, which is pretty much a non-starter anyway. And though Catinca Untaru's untutored performance is remarkable and affecting, when things go bad in both worlds, Singhe milks her for tears as ruthlessly as a silent-movie director throwing a puppy off a cliff. It stands to figure that The Fall ends up as a bejewelled blank space: filmmaker who romanticize and mythologize the storytelling process tend to be people who can't tell a story to save their lives. Real storytellers just roll up their sleeves and get to work.