![]() ![]() Lecter was a great performance, after all, and I imagine that was what was appealing about this role: a chance to get back in that mode of terribly clever, urbane evil. I should be clear: in no way is a "bad" thing that Hopkins is, effectively, coasting. This is quite undeniably the best performance that Hopkins has delivered in the current decade, both despite and because it feels a whole lot like a less evil, more snotty variation of Hannibal Lecter (the old-school version of the character, of course, not whatever he was up to in Hannibal or Red Dragon). So what floors me about this is that not only are two top-shelf actors like Hopkins and Gosling mucking about in a script like this, but both of them give it everything they've got. This particular procedural seeks to be the rarefied distillation of all procedurals, and at no moment does this stop feeling like an especially glossy and especially joyless episode of Law and Order, with Gosling playing both parts. Procedurals in general are not noted for their structural innovation or narrative trickery. This latter scenario is particularly unpleasant to remember, as it occurs somewhere between 5 and 30 times over the course of the film and each and every time it does so without a trace of variation.Įverything happens, and I can't stress this enough, exactly the way you expect it to. What little bit of mystery there might have been is crushed under the heel of the unending scenes of Gosling and his compatriots flinging legal jargon at each other and the camera, or the even more unending scenes in which Gosling harangues the police detectives who can't find any evidence. Law and NYPD Blue (and, God save us, Cop Rock), and films like Fallen and Frequency (the man likes his f-words). ![]() This becomes entirely unsurprising after a quick perusal of director Gregory Hoblit's CV: stints with L.A. It's a thin little procedural without a trace of imagination to it. I suspect there's a level at which this could have worked wonderfully (I also suspect that it's already been made, but I can't quite think of when), but Fracture is not wonderful at all. Gosling assumes this will be a cakewalk, Hopkins decides instead that it's time for fun fun cat 'n' mouse mind games. He is arrested by the very cop she was sleeping with, confesses, and the case ends up in the lap of an assistant DA (Gosling) right on the eve of his departure for a sexy, high-paying job in corporate law. This project, for the morbidly curious, runs a bit like this: a man somehow involved in aeronautical engineering (Hopkins) finds his wife is cheating on him, and he shoots her. And Hopkins, okay, is mostly insane, but still.I mean, I can understand what makes All the King's Men appealing in the abstract, but I do not understand what makes an actor who can't really need the money to read a script like this one and say, "Good lord, I want to be a part of this project!" But Gosling has a history of being pretty damn choosy with his projects, and pretty damn indie. In other words, why oh why did Anthony Hopkins and Ryan Gosling decide that it would be a fine thing to star in the movie Fracture? Obviously professional movie stars need to eat just like the rest of us. But they're really a bit like hobbits: you can learn all of their ways in a month, and after a hundred years they'll still do something that just confuses the fuck out of you. ![]()
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