Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Sat Apr 21, 2007 10:56 pm 
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Actors duel, viewers go hungry

There have been five films called "Fracture." What does it mean this time? It doesn't matter, it sounds sharp, new. It bespeaks controlled conflict. And that conflict is none other than a duel between two actors, old and young: Anthony Hopkins and Ryan Gosling. This is a slam bang crime and courtroom drama that holds your interest; but it's conventional stuff. What makes it worth seeing is nothing more nor less than the two good players.

The fact of their coming together at this moment gives rise to certain questions. Has Hopkins gotten lazy? Is Gosling as fine an actor as people think -- or have his few great or offbeat roles been a fluke? The answer is yes to all that. Hopkins has indeed become lazy, but he's still a commanding presence. And Gosling is certainly one of the finest American film actors of his generation, but his choices of roles have been erratic.

Hopkins plays a smart killer. Is this going to be a reprise of his Hannibal Lector? No, it isn't. The actor controls his little smiles, and his quips never suggest the Lector hysteria. He is surprising and still. Maybe he's being lazy, but it works. He seems to have turned into a sort of mellow blob, poison in stillness, like a jellyfish. He doesn't move, but if you walk into him, he will sting you. As the aeronautics magnate Ted Crawford he telegraphs to us right off how arrogant he is. He brushes off an underling and roars away from his business in a megabucks Italian muscle car. He goes home and shoots his wife, who's been cheating on him, in the face, and fires other shots that are heard by gardeners on his estate. The far-fetched plot requires that the cop who comes to negotiate with him thereafter is the adulterer. We must not ask how this turns out to be an intricate part of a prearranged plan. Crawford confesses, but then in court recants and calmly undertakes his own defense.

Gosling is Willy Beachum, an outstanding young L.A. prosecuting attorney who's just been hired by a big corporate law firm when he's called in for the formality of Ted Crawford's arraignment. Of course it turns out to be no formality. Beacham is caught off guard by Crawford's smug self defense; as Crawford anticipates, the police can't find a murder weapon. The pistol he had in his hand when captured was never fired. Beachum is a winner who's an underdog, a star attorney with a gilded future who's also an Oakie from poor origins, now expected to please the privileged and kowtow to them, and faced with a trial that will ruin him if he loses. If we know Gosling we know none of that is going to happen. But he too restrains himself, holding back the preening arrogance that made him so striking as the Jewish Nazi skinhead in The Believer. The underdog/winner casting fits the actor's physicality. Gosling has a trim whiplash of a body, but there's something nerdy about his face and unsubtle about his manner, a rawness that is what made the dogmatism of his character in The Believer so convincing. In the merciless close-ups that are Fracture's crude but arresting visual style he looks bristly and unshaven, with a mousy crew cut. The important thing is the way he struts about in his nice new suits, not how well they fit him. He may look like the grownup Mousecateer he is, but he's got balls of brass and he's got chops. He has the ability to make every line reading sound right.

Beachum is taken in tow, she thinks anyway, by a luscious (but generic) blonde WASP queen from the corporate law firm, Nikki Gardner (Rosamund Pike), who's to be his supervisor, and seems drawn to his energy, as they say. She invites him to her family Thanksgiving and he thanks her. "Don't thank me yet," she quips. Such hinting at the everyday realities of familial dysfunctionality or sheer boredom is a thing rare in this piece. Fracture isn't particularly concerned with ordinary human relations. It's not about human relations at all. It's about moving forward, gobbling up our attention as it pursues its crime/trial story.

Crawford has a bombshell. In court he reveals what we know: the cop who caught him, Rob Nunully (Billy Burke) was screwing his wife. Later Beachum tells Nunully, "You told me (Crawford) was smart. You didn't tell me you were stupid." We have to be stupid too to believe this plot.

There's not so much sleuthing as posturing here. We never see the cops going over Crawford's house, though we see its grandly modernist interior and elaborate gazebo sculptures, and the police are supposed to be searching it three times for the murder weapon. The excellent David Striathern as District Attorney gets lost in the ruthless mechanisms of the screenplay. He's just a neutral realist periodically analyzing Beachum's situation for him (and us), when he could have been the moral center. His part is too underwritten to give him true weight. In the end he's just a distinguished looking older man whose nice suits do fit.

Crawford's wife isn't dead. She's in the hospital in a coma. This is an ace in the hole for the film's glib writers: a victim in limbo is the opportunity for manipulative plot twists after the trial goes wrong for Beachum.

Fracture is exciting enough while we're watching it, though it achieves a lot of that by maximizing a few surprises and pumping up the adrenalin with loud bops and crashes in the soundtrack. The plot is so full of air holes you're hungry shortly after its over like after Chinese food in the old joke; all you remember is the duel of two outstanding actors. Gosling has gotten to do something a bit different (for him) and Hopkins has managed to do something similar (for him) without ever boring us. The bravura performances are fun. But we all deserved better.

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


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