The glib entertainment Fracture offers an assortment of tasty treats, notably the spectacle of that crafty scene-stealer Anthony Hopkins mixing it up with that equally cunning screen nibbler Ryan Gosling. They're beautiful slummers, these two, as well oiled and practiced as those great old-studio dissemblers who worked a soundstage to their and Louis B. Mayer's advantage. The only difference is that once upon a time Joan Crawford would have whispered dangerous nothings into Hopkins's ear, not Gosling.
There are a couple of women onboard in Fracture, though as usual they're mostly around to look good and play (almost) dead. Embeth Davidtz slips nicely into the ill-fated little woman role, the one mentioned in the eye-catching advertisements that feature Hopkins softly smiling under the words "I shot my wife." As the smiler with the wife, Hopkins's Ted Crawford does something complicated looking with airplanes, barks monosyllabic instructions at underlings ("No!") and leaves the world choking on his Porsche-churned dust. He also points and shoots, sending a bullet into his spouse's pampered cheek during the film's precision-timed opener, leaving a hole in her head as well as, presumably, his alibi.
We know that Ted Crawford did it and perhaps why — some rumpled hotel sheets provide one steamy clue — the big question, the one that sets the plot a-churning and Gosling's lawyer-character a-calling, is how the bad man plans to get away with it. All in good time, my pretties, all in good time.
PHOTO: COUTESY OF ARM
First, the lawyer, Willy Beachum, must provide some storybook diversion, mainly in the form of a high-paying new job that will take him out of the public service, where he works for the Los Angeles district attorney's office (which knows a little something if sometimes not enough about rich men accused of murdering the women in their lives), and into the well-upholstered evil of the private sector.
Hopkins and Gosling navigate the film's sleekly burnished surfaces and darkly lighted interiors, its procedural twists and courtroom turns without breaking stride or into a sweat. Each actor is playing a pulp type rather than a fully formed individual, but both fill in the blanks with an alchemical mix of professional and personal charisma. (Gosling also tosses in a Southern accent.)
Even Hopkins' most familiar tricks — a blank face capped by a hint of a shiver-inducing smile — work to the story's advantage. In a less capable film those gently upturned lips could easily repulse because they would invoke unfavorable comparisons with Hannibal Lecter; here, though, they simply remind you that memorable screen villainy can be as much a matter of impeccable manners as evil designs.
The screenwriters, Daniel Pyne and Glenn Gers, hit the customary thriller notes with a touch of humor, and the director, Gregory Hoblit (who worked similar terrain in Primal Fear), arranges those notes into a catchy, insistent rhythm. There are a few loose ends, but questions of logic have a way of receding in a film in which the bad man can be seen reflected in a pool of his victim's blood. Fracture isn't a movie about ideas; it's about slick surfaces and suggestive adjectives like rich and poor, good and evil, weak and strong. It's about the functionally ornamental Rosamund Pike, who delivers her goods in a tight sweater as Beachum's romantic foil, and the invariably reliable David Strathairn, who delivers his with a firm jaw as the younger man's moral conscience.
Finally, and without shame, this movie is about Gosling making some dough and Hopkins punching the clock.
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