Hey, last night Andy and I actually saw a movie!* We watched "The Fall," which is yet another in a long list of movies that make me wonder how I heard of it and why I felt compelled to push it to the top of my Netflix queue. "The Fall" is an unusual movie and not for everybody. It takes place around 1915, when Roy, a stuntman, is paralyzed after a foolhardy stunt and ends up in a hospital in Los Angeles, where his only pleasure seems to be chatting with Alexandria, a little Romanian girl who has her arm in a cast after she fell while picking fruit with her family of migrant workers. I read that the girl was not given an actual script, which explains her completely natural and believable performance.
Roy starts telling Alexandria a fantastic adventure story to pass the time. We hear his voice, but we see her imagination of the story, complete with brilliant costumes and breathtaking scenery. I saw many countries listed in the credits, from Spain to Argentina to China to Fiji to Bali and more—I've since read that it was shot over 4 years in some 28 different locations! Much of the cinematography is truly jaw-dropping. The characters in the fantasy sequences are all "played by" people Alexandria sees around the hospital (à la "The Wizard of Oz"). Little by little, however, we learn that Roy is suicidal and is just using Alexandria to get at the morphine cabinet in the dispensary.
Pete started watching with us, and when I looked at the Netflix envelope to see how long it was, I noticed with surprise that it was rated R. Huh? It contains no sex, no nudity, no bad language, and very little violence (and what little there is is mainly of the swashbuckler type). Then it got late and I made Pete go to bed, just in the nick of time, because there was one brief but icky scene in which Alexandria has a creepy nightmare after taking another bad fall and going unconscious, and then Roy starts killing off everyone in his story and Alexandria's imagination leaves little out. But aside from a few dead bodies (and not terribly gory ones at that), I really can't see why this got an R rating at all—I think PG-13 (or even PG) would have been adequate.
Anyhow, if you like beautiful cinematography and fantastical storytelling, you'll enjoy this. It is in no way a traditional movie in any way, though, so if that's what you're after, you might want to take a pass on this one.
*Which made me feel a little better about returning one recently, unwatched, that we'd had here since August 2008. I've decided that instead of renting stuff at Blockbuster for the kids, I'd let them have one or two of my Netlix picks, since I've already paid for them (and I rarely get to watch them anymore as it is). Steph is currently enjoying back episodes of "The Office," which we only just started letting her watch.
And now Pete has bragging rights that he has watched an R-rated movie! There was one movie we used to watch with the kids that we never realized was rated R (we would mute the TV the few times there was bad language in the movie). My son used to love to brag about that.
Posted by: Elena | December 21, 2009 at 07:16 AM