Hey, everyone. “Moriarty” here.

I’m going to hold off on a formal review of Tarsem’s THE FALL until a little closer to release, but I’ll say right now that I haven’t seen a jump in quality from first film to second film like this since Fincher went from ALIEN 3 to SE7EN.

A big part of what impressed me about the film is the work by young Catinca Untaru, the Romanian little girl who is the star of the movie. It either works or fails based on her performance, and Tarsem managed to capture some real magic onscreen, something that any director will tell you is not easy. Some directors would want to use a slightly older child, someone you could really direct and who understood what you were asking for, an “actor” like Dakota Fanning or Haley Joel Osment in their primes. But Tarsem went the other direction, choosing to use a non-actor, someone who had never been in a movie at all, someone who barely spoke English. And he intentionally cast her very young so that she hadn’t reached the age where she would be able to “act,” but instead is just reacting onscreen in every moment. Her performance is wondrous because it’s real. Tarsem set up his scenes like games, and as a result, what you see is a child’s mind at play. It reminds me of the work that Spielberg did with young Drew Barrymore in E.T. or that he did with Carey Guffey in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, and it started me thinking about just how hard it is to capture the reality of children on film.

Tarsem was in a very special situation on this film, shooting in bits and pieces over the course of four years. He shot all the “real world” material first, consisting of the story of Roy (Lee Pace) and his unlikely relationship with Alexandria (Untaru) while they’re both trapped in a Los Angeles hospital in the ‘20s. Roy’s a stuntman for the movies, possibly paralyzed after a horrible mishap, and Alexandria is in an awkward cast after breaking her arm in her family’s orange grove.

She’s a funny, chubby little thing, full of questions and sass, and there’s an enormous sense of reality to the way she plays her scenes with Pace. When casting her, there was a miscommunication, and Untaru believed that Lee Pace really was paralyzed. As a result, Tarsem changed his shooting plan and decided to keep the whole cast and crew in the dark about Pace, introducing him as a real paraplegic. For 12 weeks, Tarsem had to keep that illusion alive, but the end result is that Untaru really does seem to believe every single moment she’s in. She’s invested in the games she plays with Pace not because of some script, but because of a real relationship you can see develop between them. Much of the material in the film comes out of these genuine moments, like when Roy is trying to convince her to steal morphine for him. He writes the word out on paper, and she reads it as “M-O-R-P-H-I-N-3.” As a result, Tarsem decided to adjust the next scene by having her steal the pills as requested... but only three of them, frustrating Roy enormously.

When directors are visually oriented or technically precise, it can lead to some rough situations working with kids. There’s a story about Hitchcock directing Bill Mumy when he was young, and Mumy kept fidgeting and stepping off of his mark. Finally, exasperated, Hitchcock got very close to Mumy and confided in him, “Little boy, if you move again, I shall nail your foot to the floor, and bright red blood will gush out all over your shoe.” Needless to say, Mumy didn’t move in the next take. Great story, but that sort of filmmaking doesn’t leave a lot of room for the happy accidents that can occur when you let a child’s mind lead the scene instead of trying to jam the child into a pre-determined notion of what they are going to do. I think directors who figure out how to capture that ineffable quality of childhood imagination are remarkable, and I often revisit the great child performances in movies like PATHER PANCHALI or THE BICYCLE THIEF or CINEMA PARADISO, amazed that anyone was able to capture these moments of lightning.

Tarsem joins a short list with this picture, and it’s mature, impressive work. In a way, I hope Untaru never acts again. It would be wonderful if this was it, our total exposure to her on film. She’s so wonderful that I can’t help but feel no one is going to get this quality of work out of her again. Like the movie itself, her work is magic here. Hats off to all involved.

Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles