Fracture

Fracture begins as Ted, a wealthy engineer played by Anthony Hopkins, finds out that his wife is involved in an affair. When he sees her later at their home, he calmly shoots her in the head. As luck (or screenwriter’s coincidence) would have it, the police officer who responds just happens to be the man Ted’s wife was sleeping with.

The first third of the film leads Ted into a seemingly impossible situation: The audience knows he shot his wife because we saw him do it. The police know Ted did it because they find him at the scene of the crime, and because he provides a full confession.

Yet the story is less about Ted than Willy (Ryan Gosling), an ambitious district attorney halfway out the door on his way to a high-paying corporate job. Willy takes on the prosecution as his final case, assuming (before he finds out that the cop was involved with Ted’s wife) that it will be a slam-dunk. Soon, things begin to go very, very wrong, starting with a missing murder weapon.

The film’s suspense hinges on one question: What’s Ted’s angle and how does he think he’s going to get out of this? He is particularly cavalier about his defense; in fact, he chooses to act as his own lawyer. We sense he is toying with the police, and his menacing yet charming eyes have Willy all sized up. Ted plays Willy like a violin, preying on his arrogance and ambition.

Of course, playing the cunning killer is not exactly new territory for Hopkins; his various turns as Hannibal Lecter have paid the mortgage on several palacial homes over the past decade. But he does it so well it’s hard to complain too loudly. Though the film is essentially a thriller, Fracture has quite a bit of humor, much of it delivered by Hopkins.

Ryan Gosling’s wooden acting might have been less noticeable had he been cast against, say, Quentin Tarantino or Bruce Willis. But when he shares the screen with Anthony Hopkins, the disparity is almost glaring. To be fair, Fracture is Hopkins’s best acting since The Remains of the Day or Silence of the Lambs.

The main failing of Fracture is its implausible conceits. Films that play fast and loose with logic annoy me, and ones that show us legal situations that would have real-life lawyers and judges in stitches laughing at their absurdity annoy me even more (for example, Double Jeopardy or My Cousin Vinny). If the very elements that make Ted’s conviction so likely turn out to be so arbitrary, the tension is defused (the reason Ted’s confession gets thrown out of court is particularly weak). And I didn’t for a second buy the ending, or the fate of the policeman Ted’s wife was having an affair with. Still, Fracture is an interesting thriller with a good performance by Hopkins at his slimiest.