Pushing Daisies

Lee Pace’s fantasy film opened last week, unfortunately to less than stellar reviews. I’ve rounded up some of it:

The Premiere

• The Fall works like crazy as a multi-leveled, smart, jaw-droppingly beautiful, big-hearted piece of entertainment; I couldn’t find a single inaccessible thing about it, which makes me despair that it found so long to get a theatrical release. Still, I can’t quite bring myself to call it visionary. But it’ll more than do until the genuinely visionary comes along, as that doesn’t happen too often, especially these days.

USA Today

• The Fall is aptly named not only because it pertains to a tragic descent but because viewers will feel as if they have plunged headlong into an alternate universe with this dazzling adult fairy tale. Blending a fanciful tale and a stark reality involving an imaginative girl will stir comparisons to Pan’s Labyrinth. But it’s not nearly as linear a story, or as graphically violent. The surrealistic visuals in this ambitious film are unlike anything you’re likely to see or have seen.

New York Times

• Tarsem, as the filmmaker prefers to be called, made his name marketing soft drinks and sneakers, and “The Fall” bids to sell its audience on a visionary quest full of romance, intrigue, fabulous sights and fantastic creatures (Charles Darwin, swimming elephants, white people with dreadlocks). It’s strictly bargain bin.

Variety

• There’s something appalling about a vanity project that takes this much time, money and energy to make (shot in nearly two dozen countries). Nor can Tarsem claim the visionary entitlement of past large-scale art cinema masters like Jodorowsky or Tarkovsky, because the only thing behind his stunning pictures is an advertising genius’ instinct for the “wow” image. Those work best in isolation, though, not in two-hour compilations.

LA Times

• Tarsem underlines the film with truly obnoxious levels of pretentiousness that insist on the pretty pictures as having capital-M meaning, which only brings into sharp relief what a hollow exercise it all really is. Like De Chirico does MTV in the ’80s, his ideas of what constitutes “artful” — mostly consisting of slo-mo, tableau framing, strange costumes and a romanticized exoticism — seem at best encased in amber and at worst completely regressive. For a film that wants to present itself as extravagantly dazzling, there is something thuddingly familiar and bland in its vision.

Lee Pace, The Fall, Tarsem