Fracture Review
by samseescinema (sammeriam AT comcast DOT net)April 24th, 2007
Fracture
reviewed by Samuel Osborn
As a vehicle, Fracture is a speedy little motorcycle equipped dandily with a sidecar. Ryan Gosling straddles the driver's seat, Anthony Hopkins riding shotgun. The film is an obvious vehicle for the two actors, but as they lithely slide through the genre picture it becomes apparent exactly why: Gosling and Hopkins are unshakably charming. And put to roles that play to all their strengths, Fracture becomes a mildly blissful thing, where the actors need only to read their lines for the film to work. If Fracture were a product, somewhere upon its packaging it would read "No Assembly Required."
But assembly, in the hands of Director Gregory Hoblit, does indeed occur. He compounds the courtroom genre story of a wily, ladder- climbing lawyer (Ryan Gosling) with the kind of over-the-top genre filmmaking that most of us thought had died with the advent of subtlety in motion pictures (i.e. sometime after German Expressionism had run its course in the thirties). He laces every angle, shadow, and credit sequence with a visual motif to exude the idea of "fracture." The villain, this time Anthony Hopkins playing a billionaire aeronautics mogul, is so diabolically detached from humanity that his hobbies include constructing complex wire contraptions to roll steel marbles through. The hero, Gosling, is fresh enough for Mr. Hoblit to slap him with a quiet southern drawl that sends the alarms for "character innocence" blaring. Even the music is a garish knock-off of television courtroom dramas like "Law & Order" and "Boston Legal." The style, though often pretty, makes us want to scream "We get it already!"
Luckily the writing from Daniel Pyne and Glenn Gers stores up enough cunning to pitch Hopkins and Gosling into several rounds of sly verbal joust. Hopkins' character, the slippery criminal genius Ted Crawford, is a sort-of reprisal of his iconic Hannibal Lecter (mind you, without the bit about cannibalism), managing to craft a defense for shooting his wife despite having given a full confession and being apprehended still with the murder weapon in hand. The young Willy Beachum (Gosling) takes the case with one foot out the door of the D.A.'s office, about to leave for the major-league law firm Wooton & Sims. He's expecting a quick conviction and treats the case like small potatoes. It isn't until he's neck-deep in quicksand and hanging from the cliff of unemployment that he realizes Crawford might have the whole case rigged.
The film reads a lot like the 1982 Paul Newman courtroom vehicle, The Verdict, with writers Pyne and Gers even mimicking David Mamet's curt, speedy dialogue. It's at times exhilarating and at other times slowed by the obligations of genre storytelling, where we wish the motions of the formula could just be skimmed over to make way for the more tasty morsels. But the vehicle runs well; it's oiled and manicured for satisfaction. No assembly required.
Samuel Osborn
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