The Fall (2006) is one of those movies you’ll either love—saying it is a wonderful flight of a child’s fancy—or detest—saying it is a vanity project that may look great but has no substance. It depends how you react to the two stories. The framing story is of two hospital patients in Los Angeles around 1915. The young man is paralyzed from a fall on a movie set, has lost the love of his life, and would prefer to kill himself with an overdose of morphine pills. The five or six year-old girl fell from a tree and has her arm in a cast. He starts telling her a story he makes up on the spur of the moment. I found the little girl charming, but her Romanian accent and some dubious audio made it difficult to catch some of what she said. Some people would find the guy off-putting because he injects a morbid note to a light-hearted story and he manipulates the little girl to get him morphine tablets. Neither of these bothered me. However, I felt little for him because he is not developed as a character. Why and how was he trying to break into silent films? Why and how did his girl friend leave him, and why is he so distraught?
The adventure story he concocts is seen through the young girl’s imagination, and that is the strength of the film. But the story is not engaging. A disparate band of characters enact revenge on an evil tyrant. The tyrant remains a cardboard character, and the band of men are all physically distinct but otherwise undeveloped. Supporters of the film might say, “What do you expect from an off-the-cuff story filtered through a five year-old’s imagination?” On the other hand, the story has to engage the adult viewer, and more well-rounded characters would certainly help.