Cat and mouse
Deborah Ross
Fracture 15, nationwide This film is all right, actually. I sound surprised? I am surprised. I could only be more surprised if the doorbell went and it was Daniel Craig in his Speedos. ‘Daniel!’ I would say, in surprise. ‘This is most unexpected but, now you’re here, shall we have sex?’ I think he might be quite surprised, too, particularly if he was looking for next door and someone vaguely pretty. ‘Still, you’re here now,’ I’ll repeat, once I’ve got him in a headlock.
Anyway, enough of that. Where were we? Oh, yes. I’m surprised I enjoyed this film as much as I did because I don’t usually go in for psychological thrillers, especially if they have courtroom scenes — oh, the sheer tedium of most courtroom scenes but Fracture actually kept me wanting to know what would happen next. It’s not a perfect film by any means, just as the murder at the heart of it is not the perfect murder it is meant to be. In fact, you can see the imperfections in both a mile off. But is it enjoyable? Yes, it is.
Here’s the deal: Ted Crawford (Anthony Hopkins), a brilliant engineer, shoots his wife and confesses. An open-and-shut case, you would think, and this is certainly what Willy Beachum (Ryan Gosling) thinks. Beachum is an ambitious, arrogant, hotshot prosecutor with a 97 per cent success rate who agrees to take on the case so he can add one more win to his record before leaving the DA’s office and taking up a new lucrative position in corporate law. Given the evidence against Ted, he can tie all this up in a week, right?
Wrong. We know Beachum’s prediction will be wrong because a) where is the film in that?; b) where is the film in that; and c) where is the film in that? In short: there just isn’t a film in that. However, Beachum doesn’t know he’s in a film, so doesn’t even suspect he’s wrong until he discovers, in court, that the arresting officer was the victim’s lover. Also, Crawford’s gun doesn’t match that used in the murder. What follows is, essentially, a game of cat and mouse between Crawford and Beachum in which the tension and intrigue arise not from wondering whether Crawford did it — we know he did — but from how he’s going to prove he didn’t.
It’s an elegant script, and witty too, particularly in those scenes where Ted, acting as his own counsel, slyly demolishes Willy’s case along with his ego and career prospects. Ha! In fact, the best scenes are the courtroom scenes. Ted’s a one, though. His speciality is fracture mechanics, a tool for spotting structural flaws in aeronautical systems, but he thinks he’s pretty good at spotting and exploiting the weaknesses in people, too; the places where fractures are most likely to occur. Can he spot Beachum’s? Crawford is, it soon becomes clear, a sociopath, a psychopath, and almost every other type of ‘path’ apart from a garden path, which never does any harm to anybody unless you trip up.
This isn’t, in fact, really Anthony Hopkins’s film. Well, it is, but it isn’t. It is, because it is certainly meant to be, but it isn’t because Gosling upstages him at every turn by not upstaging him. Hopkins does, alas, play it as a kind of taunting, Hannibal Lecter Lite. It’s a raised eye brow here, and a creepy smile there, and when it’s neither of those it’s a twitch of a nostril or a hard stare with those cold, pin-prick eyes. I don’t like Anthony Hopkins so much since the Americans got hold of him. Remember how brilliant he could be in British films — Howard’s End, say, or The Remains of the Day — when the merest quiver could denote a thought? He just didn’t overact. But here, at least, Gosling doesn’t fight overacting with overacting, which would be a disaster. He lets Hopkins walk all over him. He lets the scenes be stolen. But is he insipid? Never. Gosling is a compelling actor, a sort of Ed Norton before Ed Norton stopped being interesting. You can’t take your eyes off him.
Look, this isn’t a perfect film, as I’ve said. The plot isn’t as ingenious as it thinks it is. There is little back story. What, for example, did Ted’s wife ever see in her bloodless loon of a husband? There’s also a dull subplot concerning Beachum’s beautiful attorney girlfriend (Rosamund Pike) and the emptiness of corporate riches that is as tedious as it is unnecessary. But I still enjoyed it. I’d enjoy it more if I could get Daniel Craig in a headlock, but I enjoyed it all the same. (PS My partner, reading over my shoulder, just said, ‘For God’s sake, leave Daniel Craig alone. It’s all so boring now.’ Talk about jealous!)
Previous page
