Fall, The (Blu-ray)

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Tarsem Singh has won awards on two continents for commercials he directed through Radical Media, and as a director of music videos he won Best Video of the Year at the 1991 MTV awards for R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion." While his first feature film, "The Cell" (2000), was panned as being little more than a protracted music video, the buzz around "The Fall" was like a summer's evening saturated with cidadas.

"The Fall" debuted at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival and saw a limited theatrical release in the U.S. after winning special mention at the 2007 Berlin International Film Festival. It's the kind of labor-of-love that usually makes me get right behind a project like this--shot on 26 locations in 18 countries and filmed with an international cast that couldn't always communicate with each other. It was a dream pursued over four years and financed largely out-of-pocket. As with Singh's other work, "The Fall" is ripe and bursting with rich, vibrant colors, epic-style shots, and a slightly surreal landscape that intrudes on reality. Like "The Princess Bride" (1987) it's a story within a story that's told from an adult to an at-first reluctant youngster, with the relationship between the two serving as a subtle side plot. But like that other frame tale, "Big Fish" (2003), the content of the stories is more fantastic and, yes, surreal (there's that word again), but not in a Salvador Dali dripping clock sort of way. Singh's surrealism reinforces the exotica, rather than fragmentizing the images or our associations with them. We're not invited to rethink reality as much as we are to accept this vision of the surreal as a visual stimulant, a panacea of sorts.

I loved the fairytale humor of "The Princess Bride," and I loved the sleuthing portrait of a father that emerged from the surreal segments of "Big Fish." So why didn't I respond as well to "The Fall"?

In fiction workshops, when all but one person thinks the same about a work, everyone shrugs off that person's criticisms as being a "quirky reading." Well, readers, I'll warn you that what I'm about to offer here is probably one of those quirky readings. I know full well that critics have praised this film; I just can't bring myself to join the chorus.

Yes, it's visually stunning, and in Blu-ray it practically leaps off the screen. But too much of the film didn't move me emotionally, and I found myself thinking that the "invented" portion was more narrative than story. Things happened, one after the other, but not with enough dramatic force and not with the same episodic cliff-hanging regularity or with the same sense of purpose as in "The Princess Bride." And the sum of the images themselves wasn't greater than the parts, as was the case with "Big Fish." I just figure that something is wrong when, instead of getting caught up in the exotic Technicolor fantasy narrative, you can't wait to get back to scenes that show the two principal characters interacting in drab "reality."

Set in the Twenties, "The Fall" opens with a black-and-white shot of a film crew in action, hoisting a horse from a 40-foot drop into a river where two men tread water, waiting to be thrown ropes. After that heavily symbolic opening, the scene shifts to a hospital near Los Angeles, where a laid-up stuntman named Roy Walker (Lee Pace) has no feeling in his legs. While lying in bed he notices a curious but shy little girl who has one arm in a cast. He learns that she's Alexandria (Catinca Untaru), and that she has a story of her own. At first we believe that he's telling a fantastic story to help her get her mind off of her own pain, both physical and emotional. But as the narrative unfolds, it turns out that he is also hoping that by getting close to this ambulatory little girl he can convince her to secretly take drugs from the hospital's pharmacy. Why? Because Roy doesn't want to continue living this way.

Well, I'm not about to tell anyone too much about a plot and ruin it, except to say that there's a disproportionate emphasis on the fantastic stories he tells the little girl--so much so that I personally felt it intruded on the real story, like a tedious digression that makes us want to skip to the "good parts." It becomes more interesting when reality intrudes on the story Roy tells, and real people (such as a nurse, played by Justine Waddell) end up in the story, or else the story changes to fit Roy's moods and mounting desperation. But there were a number of times where I was honestly tempted to fast-forward--a sin for movie lovers.