Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
4/21/07
I love a good thriller.
The prospect of seeing a clever mystery solved by clever people with danger
around every corner hits so many visceral and intellectual hotspots that
it's easy to forget how rarely these movies really work. There are
lots of reasons thrillers go wrong: crafting a convincing mystery
is hard, populating it with likable characters isn't as easy as it seems
(after all, many of them have to be lawyers), and the need for twists and
turns makes it easy to break faith with the viewer. Director Gregory
Hoblit is best known for Primal Fear (although he also directed
the sensational Frequency), a movie that I felt was fatally tripped
up by its' own cleverness. But his new film Fracture is a
model thriller: a battle of wits between two great characters, one
of whom is trying to get away with an exceedingly clever “perfect murder”.
Ted Crawford (Anthony Hopkins)
is a brilliant engineer whose wife (Embeth Davidtz) is having an affair
with police hostage negotiator Rob Nunally (Billy Burke). One night,
Ted confronts her with the truth, then calmly shoots her in the face.
Staging a “hostage situation”, he draws Rob to his home, where he turns
over the murder weapon and confesses. Enter Prosecutor Willy Beachum
(Ryan Gosling), who's finishing up his work under DA Joe Lobruto (David
Strathairn) before taking a high-paying new job at a private firm.
Willy takes the open-and-shut case, in which Ted insists on defending himself.
Then, bit by bit, the evidence begins to collapse. The gun he gave
Rob has never been fired. Search after search of the house turns
up no second weapon. And once the truth about the affair is out,
even the confession can't be trusted. Ted knows how to look for weak
spots in people, and he's quick to find Willy's: “You're a winner”.
And he has to win, because as the case turns against him, his new firm
starts having second thoughts about that job...
Once all the pieces are on
the table, the most remarkable thing about Ted's plan is not just how clever
it is, but how elegantly simple. And the same can be said of Fracture.
It pits two Type A personalities against each other, and Gosling and Hopkins
make their tug of war sing. In his first outing as “Academy Award
Nominee Ryan Gosling”, he shows real star power, and invests Willy with
all manner of delightful tics and flaws. Ted seems so weird, so hopelessly
overmatched, that the young lawyer makes the mistake of enjoying his chance
for a quick conviction, and even though he's not all that sympathetic at
the start, Gosling makes us enjoy it along with him. On the other
side, Ted is so smart, so slick, so... Anthony Hopkins that it's a treat
watching him first set and then spring his trap. The former Hannibal
attacks the role with such sinister glee, it seems he might break out in
a jig at any moment, and once the tables have turned, the dynamic is pure
Columbo.
Ted's holding all the cards, but he's so smug, so proud of his brilliance
that you just have to hope there's a weak spot somewhere in his master
plan...
The supporting cast is full
of good roles and good actors. Strathairn has the concession on stern,
decent authority figures these days, and Bob Gunton has a couple great
scenes as a sympathetic judge. Burke shines as the cop totally caught
in Ted's spider web, more and more trapped the more he struggles.
Like Gosling, Cliff Curtis shows great spontaneity in a stock role, as
the cop who keeps failing to find that all-important evidence. Hoblit
over-directs at times, but he's got a gift for getting the most out of
actors that shows again here. Screenwriters Daniel Pyne and Glenn
Gers must be credited not only with unusually elegant storytelling, but
also with finding the most poignant way I've ever seen to use a passage
from a Dr. Seuss book.
Fracture is a formula
movie, and it doesn't exactly rise above that formula. At the end
of the day, it's a chance to watch some great actors sink their teeth into
a story that would make a really good episode of a TV lawyer show.
But there's pretty much nothing you could be asking for when you buy your
ticket that you're not going to get, and all you need to do is think back
over how few recent thrillers can make that claim to know Fracture's
achievements are nothing to sneeze at. |
