Moviegoer Diary: The Fall, Married Life

THE FALL

Plot In A Nutshell
Tarsem’s visually opulent fantasy, set in a 1920s hospital, about a paralyzed Hollywood stuntman (Lee Pace) who improvises a fairytale to an injured little girl (Catinca Untaru) as part of a plan to persuade her to steal enough morphine from the dispensary for him to kill himself.

Thoughts
I sure wasn’t expecting to like this movie as much as I did—Tarsem’s previous film, the serial-killer thriller The Cell, struck me as self-indulgent nonsense... plus the guy dropped his last name a few years ago and now just calls himself “Tarsem,” for God’s sake.

But wow—The Fall really put me under its spell. It’s the movie that Terry Gilliam wanted The Adventures of Baron Munchausen to be, before the sheer size of the project crushed him under its weight. It’s a movie that revels in the joy of storytelling, but which also recognizes the power of stories to do horrible damage if used for the wrong purposes. And it’s a movie that genuinely respects the innocence of childhood—I can’t think of another film that combines such careful, precise, complex camerawork with such a natural performance from a child actor. (Oh, wait—I just thought of one. City of God.)

Catinca Untaru was about six years old when her scenes in The Fall where filmed, and her behaviour is so unaffected that it’s almost startling—you’re simply not used to seeing a child onscreen who acts the way normal children do. Her scenes with Lee Pace were largely improvised, and it’s wonderful to see the way she misunderstands him, interrupt him, talk over his lines, answer his questions with total non sequiturs, and once or twice even completely “block” his improvs. Her accent (I’m assuming from her name that she’s Romanian) occasionally makes her a little hard to understand, and the fact that she’s missing her two front teeth doesn’t help matters any, but there’s such a purity to her presence onscreen that you can’t take your eyes off her.

That said, when she’s not onscreen, Tarsem certainly gives you plenty to look at. The imagery here isn’t much different from what he gave us in The Cell—lots of deserts and silk banners flapping in the wind, lots of male models in flowing robes, lots of slow-motion shots of people running and falling from great heights—but for some reason it all clicked for me here. Maybe it helps that there’s a bit more humour to Tarsem’s presentation of the images this time out—Pace’s stuntman is constantly revising the characters’ backstory (and sometimes even their voices and appearances) according to Untaru’s whims. And so the images often contain deliberately, delightfully absurd details, like the outrageous feathered coat, as gaudy as a pink-and-white peacock’s tail, that one of the heroes of Pace’s story wears at all times, even when he’s trudging across the desert. (Even more absurd: the character is supposed to be Charles Darwin.) It’s like Alejeandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain reconceived as a children’s storybook.

But it’s a children’s storybook with shadows crouching on the margins—the person telling the story wants to die, and there’s a very real sense that at any given moment, he could take all his characters down into the chasm with him. (There’s a key subplot involving an older patient who briefly befriends Untaru as well; he tells her that if she’s ever frightened, or if unhappy thoughts fill her head, all she has to do to banish them is say the magic words “Googly googly!” A few scenes later, we learn that the old man has killed himself. “Googly googly” wasn’t enough for him.)

The costumes, by the way, were designed by Eiko Ishioka, whose other film credits include Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mishima, which is near the top of the pile of DVDs on my TV set waiting to be watched. It’s right underneath the 20th anniversary edition of Child’s Play, which suggests that my DVD-watching priorities are kind of askew.



RATING: 5/5


* * *

MARRIED LIFE

Plot In A Nutshell
Ira Sachs’ Sirkian suspense film, set in 1949, about a married man (Chris Cooper) who wants to leave his wife (Patricia Clarkson) for a younger woman (Rachel McAdams), but is so determined to spare her any pain that he decides his only option is to kill her instead.

Thoughts
If Mad Men is looking for directors for upcoming episodes, they should check out Married Life and let Ira Sachs into their fold. Married Life takes place about 12 or 13 years before Mad Men does, but it has the same measured pace and the same fetishistic fascination with the strange sexual mores of a bygone time.

And wow, does it love the period details! The inlaid wood in the elevators, the broad-brimmed hats, the neon café signs, the Bakelite telephones, the uniformed ushers at the movie theatres, the pleated pants on the men and the satiny blouses on the women, the way the road looks late at night illuminated by the headlights of a vintage Cadillac—it’s all here, laid out in luscious colour by cinematographer Peter Deming (who also shot Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, and who obviously knows a thing or two about shooting late-night California highways). Sachs could not have had a very large budget on this film, but it looks superb. It appears that most, if not all, of it was shot in Canada, and I’d love to know what city has office buildings and restaurants that look as great as the ones in Married Life, because I’m moving there immediately.



The film is based on a 1953 novel by John Bingham with the perplexing but evocative title Five Roundabouts to Heaven. It was apparently set in France, but something about Chris Cooper’s character—that odd, repressed sense of propriety that would actually make him think poisoning his wife is more humane than divorcing her—seems quintessentially American to me. (Sachs wrote the adaptation with Oren Moverman, who also wrote I’m Not There with Todd Haynes and worked on the script to Jesus' Son as well. Who is this Moverman fellow? He intrigues me.) It reminds me a little of The Deep End, that odd little “domestic noir” from a few years ago with Tilda Swinton, whose character, like Chris Cooper’s, shows a surprising willingness to resort to murder in order to preserve an air of domestic tranquility.

Hey—I forgot to mention that Pierce Brosnan is in this thing. He plays Cooper’s best friend, a bachelor who’s immediately attracted to Cooper’s lover and who quietly sets about manipulating events so that she winds up with him instead. He’s excellent, just like he was in The Tailor of Panama and The Matador—he’s settling into a nice, effortless dapper-but-dangerous groove which makes me think leaving the James Bond series was the best thing that could have happened to him as an actor. (Let’s just pretend Mamma Mia! never happened, okay?)

Also: Married Life has some of the most stylish opening credits of the year—an animated sequence set to Doris Day’s version of “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby” that makes witty use of images from vintage magazine ads. Another bit of Mad Men overlap!



RATING: 4/5