Performance Art

This afternoon, I went to see the movie Fracture. I first became aware of this movie a couple months ago, when I walked out of a theater after seeing something else, and saw the very simple poster for Fracture (pictured at the left). Anthony Hopkins and Ryan Gosling. Two guys who can both really act. I didn't know a thing about the movie, and in the weeks that would follow, I never even saw a trailer for it. I did eventually see a second Fracture poster featuring just Hopkins, with "I Shot My Wife" emblazoned broadly across the top. Still more intriguing, to be sure, but I never really got more than "there's a movie coming with two guys who can really act."

Which is fortunate, because having now seen it, I feel that's really the thing going for it -- the one thing to really trumpet about the movie. Fracture is a tale you've seen in many incarnations before, of a cold and calculating killer who has committed the "perfect crime," and his opponent trying to keep him from getting away with it. It's built on methodical pacing and mind games between the characters, very much trying to be a Hitchcock kind of thriller.

In particular, it takes one very specific page from Hitchcock's playbook -- it gives the audience more information than the characters have, in an effort to build suspense. It's been paraphrased many ways, but Hitchcock is well known to have said something to this effect: a bomb goes off suddenly, and that's surprise; we see a bomb ticking under a table, that's suspense. In Fracture, we know what tricky twist Hopkins' character is going to spring on Gosling's character of the prosecuting attorney... a good 30 minutes ahead of time.

The trouble is, this doesn't play like suspense at all. It more feels like we're just marking time until the real movie starts. Gosling's character thinks he has a slam dunk case, and we all know it's not going to be that simple. But until he catches up to us, we're just waiting for the real drama to begin.

In fact, the only thing the writing does keep masked from the audience is one specific detail of how Hopkins' character hid the evidence that would actually prove his crime. At least, it tries to. I think. If it was trying to hide it, it did a damn poor job. I had it figured out very early on in the movie, as did all three of the people who went with me to see it.

Now, one could argue that the story is really in the head games between the two main characters, and not the particulars of the plot. But in my opinion, figuring out the key "twist" to the mystery in advance made the entire movie feel much like that first 30 minutes "wait." The entire movie was just a long wait for the twist to be exposed, so that the inevitable conclusion could follow.

Having said all that, you probably now have the idea that I really didn't like the movie. But remember what I said at the outset -- my only expectation going in was to see the performances of two actors who can really act. And that's exactly what I got. Anthony Hopkins and Ryan Gosling really bolstered this subpar material with very focused and strong performances. Sure, Hopkins was lifting more than a few pages from the Hannibal Lecter playbook, but the man did win an Oscar for that role (deservedly so), and it's pretty much what we all as an audience want to see.

I figure it all works out to about a B-, though it's not a movie that would suffer in any way if you waited to see it later on DVD.