Review: Fracture (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