DAKOTA FANNING PREPARES TO TURN BORN-AGAIN: NO ATHIESTS UNDER DINER TABLES

Conventional slices: another illegitimate offspring of Haggis and Arriaga

Directed by Australian Rowan Woods, Fragments (AKA Winged Creatures) is another one of those sliced-and-diced films that begins with a violent event and then explores the lives of people caught up in it while flashing back to reveal details of what happened. A remarkable cast does little to bestow meaning or logic upon this poor relation of Babel and Crash, though portentous music, rug-chewing performances, and the desire to see what, if anything, it all means keep you watching through this film's labored 100 minutes.

Carla (Kate Beckinsale) is the diner waitress who emerges unscathed; but her baby won't stop crying. A gunman has entered the place, terrorizing everyone and killing the father of Annie (Dakota Fanning) and himself. She and Jimmy (Josh Hutcherson) sink down the floor and survive, but the boy turns mute while she becomes a born-again preacher annoyingly leading everybody in prayer from her dad's funeral onward. Jackie Earle Haley, Jimmy's dad, angrily defends the boy's right to remain silent. Haley's good, but his role is too tiny a fragment. So is Jeanne Tripplehorn as Annie's mother, convincing but too little seen.

Charlie (Forest Whitaker) is a hangdog driving teacher who's just been diagnosed with perhaps fatal cancer. He miraculously survives being shot, then wanders out of the hospital and drives to Vegas, leaving his daughter Kathie (Jennifer Hudson, good as usual but underused) mystified as to where he is, winning a hundred thousand dollars, then losing them, borrowing a lot more from mafiosi, then losing that. His segment (and his acting, alas) lead us into tacky melodrama, but not enlightenment. Sheriffs are nosing around, as if his former credit card debts made him complicit in the massacre.

There's a psych worker who goes around trying to get people to talk, a tendentious effort in the screenplay to lecture us about PTSS and how to deal with it.

Jimmy's mysterious personal agenda leads him back to the deserted diner. As the camera pans through it I longed for the dialogue in Pulp Fiction, or the flashy confrontation in Cronenberg's History of Violence. This diner winds up feeling unused.

It's hard to figure out why Dr. Laraby (Guy Pearce), who's busy in ER surgery post diner tragedy, is later called upon to look at Carla's crying baby repeatedly, other than so they can flirt. Small town, LA, show biz. Hard to see why Laraby starts poisoning his wife (Embeth Davidtz) and almost kills her. "I love it when you play doctor with me," she says. Unbeknownst to her, he give her migraines and then cures them, and keeps looking up side effects of new drugs, which James LeGros has helped him figure out how to manipulate. The climax involves the bravery of Annie's dad, which is one final flashback revelation that absolutely isn't one.

Hard to look away from, but silly, pointless stuff all the same. Rarely have so many good actors been brought together with such poor results.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.