By Kofi Outlaw
For every new role that he accepts, I’m pretty sure Sir Anthony Hopkins has to turn down a hundred scripts that call for him to play some bastardized version of Hannibal Lector. Imagine my surprise then to come across FRACTURE, a film that denies its own existence as a SILENCE OF THE LAMBS knock-off by dressing itself up as a courtroom drama.
Hopkins plays Ted Crawford, an analytical genius and safety inspector, who’s made a fortune divining the flaws in complex machinery. An eerily calm, calculated man, Crawford never loses composure when he discovers that his young trophy wife is having an affair. Instead, he does what he always does: analyzes, looks for weakness and then exploits those weaknesses. One night, when his wife returns home after a romp with her lover, Crawford calmly says his goodbyes, before he pulls out a gun and shoots her in the head, within earshot of all his groundskeepers and servants.
The police arrive to a scene along with a crisis negotiator to coax Crawford out of his home. The joke is on the negotiator though: Crawford’s wife was the woman he’d been having the affair with—a fact he had no way of knowing, since she insisted the affair remain strictly anonymous. The jilted lover hauls Crawford down to the station, secures his confession, vindicated that the monster will rot in prison for the rest of his life.
The state gets hotshot Deputy District Attorney Willy Beachum (Ryan Gosling), who has never lost a case, to close the books on Crawford nice and smoothly. Willy only half cares about the obligation; he is in the process of leaving his haggard job as a public prosecutor for a cushy, high-paying job at the city’s largest corporate law firm. The new job comes with a hot new boss, Nikki (Rosamund Pike), who instructs Willy to close out the past quickly so that he can embrace his glorious new future.
At the hearing for Crawford’s case, the evil genious takes a shine to country-bumpkin-made-good Willy (Clarice Starling Alert!); Crawford opts to forgo a lawyer and represent himself, on the stipulation that Willy be his prosecutor, setting up a one-on-one match-up Willy is happy to accept. The young prosecutor goes to the first day of trial half-cocked and unprepared, sure that his case is airtight. It’s a setup of course: Crawford reveals to the court that the arresting officer was also his wife’s lover, thereby rendering the confession null and void. Even worse, the supposed murder weapon has never been fired, and doesn’t match the shell casings collected from the scene of the crime. Crawford had no powder residue on his clothes or person, and there are no eyewitnesses who can attest to having actually seen Crawford pull the trigger. In five minutes flat, Willy goes from shutting the books on his final case, to the living nightmare of having no case at all.
That erroneous stumble lands Willy in a world of trouble. His new corporate bosses don’t want a screw-up on the team, and his old bosses in the DA’s office need a scapegoat to take the heat. This is exactly where Crawford wants Willy: trapped between a rock and a hard place, with weaknesses fully exposed. While Crawford tries to work Hannibal Lector mind games on him, Willy tries to keep his eyes on locating the missing murder weapon, the one thing that can return him to his cushy new job and the angelic girl waiting just beyond this bit of hell. The harder Willy fights to rise above, the lower Crawford manages to pull him. Without giving the plot twists away, Crawford manages to avoid incarceration, stepping over Willy to win his freedom. But before the maniacal murderer can celebrate too much, Willy, disgraced and discredited, has one last trick left up his sleeve.
While an evil genius character like Ted Crawford is, by now, surely a cakewalk for Hopkins to play, it is to Gosling’s credit that he is able to not only hang with Hopkins in the scenes they share, trading snarky quips and razored one-liners—he even manages to get in a few pretty good shots of his own. However, both actors are clearly in it for a bit of practice and a paycheck. Gosling’s sad eyes and heavy-headedness hollowly echo the quiet torment and eye-checked melancholy he evoked for his Oscar-nominated turn in HALF NELSON. Hopkins is just happy to be playing the brainy bad guy again—I counted about have a dozen winks to Dr. Lector in his performance. Still, when you’re talking about two actors of this caliber, even their improv and exorcises are more engaging than what most of their peers bring to the screen.
It’s a good thing too, because beyond watching Gosling and Hopkins face off, there really isn’t too much to FRACTURE that we couldn’t have gotten from an episode of LAW & ORDER. This is a by-the-numbers courtroom procedural, and while there are some pretty original twists, they leave you with more of an “Oh that’s clever,” feeling rather than an “Oh wow, I never saw that coming!” kind of euphoria. Director Gregory Hoblit frames some pretty good shots and scenes. None to write home about though. Hoblit wisely opts to give his powerhouse leads the needed breathing room for them to flex their acting muscles. Parts of the film that occur outside the courtroom feel stalled, half-formed, and are somewhat distracting—including Willy’s romance with ice-queen prosecutor Nikki, which should be nominated for “weakest chemistry between two hot people, 2007.”
FRACTURE is the type of movie that you’ll catch on TV, probably during a Sunday “Million Dollar Movie” afternoon while you’re cleaning your house. You’ll read the names of the headliners and say to yourself “Oh! I remember when Hopkins and/or Gosling did this!” You might even half pay attention, if you’ve got that much cleaning to do. Otherwise, this film will become another forgotten flick on an actor’s résumé, whose name is kept alive only through the good grace of IMDB. Don’t everyone rush out at once to see it.