ENTERTAINMENT / Review
Fracture
By Jan Stuart (Newsday)
Updated: 2007-04-30 11:18
There is a shot of Ryan Gosling in the new crime thriller "Fracture,"
tooling down a residential street in Los Angeles behind the wheel of a
well-used red BMW. The famous Hollywood sign sprawls across the hills
behind him, floating above his head like a white crown. His face wears a
look of assurance, contentment even, emanating with the unmistakable heat
of a guy who has finally arrived.
The shot bespeaks the self-satisfied glory of his character, Willy
Beachum, an assistant district attorney whose fierce 97 percent
conviction rate has bagged him a position in one of the city's primo law
firms. But it also radiates with the triumph of a deserving young actor
who, having carefully nurtured his street cred with a succession of
excellent indie roles and one slushy commercial hit ("The Notebook"), is
now a player in the big town.
In "Fracture," Gosling gets to play the fool to a malevolent Anthony
Hopkins, a potentially thankless role that did wonders for Jodie Foster
on another occasion. Hopkins' character, a brainy, well-heeled mechanical
engineer named Ted Crawford, lacks the extensive murder resume of his
Hannibal Lecter; Ted merely shot his wife point-blank, leaving her
unconscious and uneaten. But he takes a page or two from Lecter's rule
book, reveling in head games that reduce his confident opponents to
quivering, ineffectual blobs of Jell-O.
We smell trouble the minute Gosling's character takes on the prosecution
of Crawford's crime, just as he's about to walk out the door to his
lucrative new job. Beachum is just too cocky; he needs to be knocked down
a peg or two. What's more, the case stinks to heaven. Having attempted to
kill his wife (Embeth Davidtz) for cheating on him and then having
barricaded himself against the cops, Crawford welcomes a hostage
negotiator (Billy Burke) into his house with open arms. Crawford is
hauled away; a murder weapon is removed; a confession is signed. Done
deal.
But it's too open and shut to be that easy, and besides, it's just the
beginning of the picture. We recognize that wily glint in Hopkins' eye
from "The Silence of the Lambs," and we already understand the havoc a
man is capable of wreaking from the confinement of a jail cell. Once
Crawford steps up to serve as his own attorney, you know that the young
prosecutor's professional unmaking is about to commence.
Directed with a sure hand by Gregory Hoblit (who knows something about
cocky attorneys and devious criminals from "Primal Fear"), "Fracture"
walks a thin line between fulfilling expectations and confounding them.
Screenwriter Daniel Pyne does a reasonably good job in balancing the
battle of wits between his rising legal-eagle and his calculating
wife-killer.
The casting of the overexposed Hopkins ends up working against their
efforts, however: It's almost too obvious to be fresh and interesting. I
found myself resenting the niggling feeling that I was supposed to find
Crawford's pinprick wit kind of cool, in that gotcha Hannibal way.
To his credit, Gosling retrieves some of the scenery before Hopkins can
swallow it whole, injecting Willy Beachum's swagger with a measure of
vulnerability that makes his precipitous fall from grace rending to
watch. Gosling is the real deal. One hopes that as his star ascends,
he'll maintain the grip on terra firma required to prevent his
character's hubris from becoming his own.
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