The Fall, a whacked-out fairy tale for grown-ups, is as stunning in its beauty as it is in its lack of logic.
Indian writer-director Tarsem Singh, who just goes by the name Tarsem, knows how to create some sumptuous visuals, as he did with his similarly gorgeous but pretentious 2000 thriller The Cell starring Jennifer Lopez and Vincent D'Onofrio. He has quite an imagination, all right, as you would imagine from a commercial and music-video veteran. (Tarsem's best known work is still the clip for R.E.M.'s Losing My Religion, and that was back in 1991.) You just wonder where he's going with it. Too often the images, shot over several years in countries including Bali, Fiji, South Africa and Italy, seem to exist because they're cool-looking and weird, and for no other reason. The convoluted story, which Tarsem co-scripted with Dan Gilroy and Nico Soultanakis, follows the friendship that forms between an injured stuntman (Lee Pace) and a little girl with a broken collar bone (Romanian newcomer Catinca Untaru). Both are stuck in a hospital in 1915 Los Angeles.