Dir. Gregory Hoblit, US, 2006, 113 mins
Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Ryan Gosling, David Strathairn, Rosamund Pike
Review by Peter Fraser
Fracture is an enjoyable and pleasingly old fashioned - if rarely inspired – thriller manifestly influenced by Hitchcock and sundry court-room dramas retaining both the apparent moral ambivalence and actual moral didacticism of many noir films. Gosling plays Willy Beachum, a young assistant district attorney from a working class background, who has blazed a trail with his unprecedented success in the court room and is on the verge of leaving for a lucrative job with a corporate law firm. His last case involves the malevolent Ted Crawford played by Hopkins and, while to elaborate further would spoil some surprises, Crawford not only proves to be a worthy adversary for Beachum but also shatters his egoistic moral complacency.
As in film noir the gleaming and enticing façade of high society shields corrupt secrets and conspiracies. On the one hand there is the evil Ted Crawford, manipulating the law entirely to his own ends, while on the other there is Strathairn as the decent District Attorney Joe Lobrutto who pursues law for higher ideals of justice. They prove to be contrasting father figures from different socio-economic backgrounds, reminiscent of Oliver Stone's Wall Street, who dramatise the struggle in Willy Beachum's soul between his self-centred desire to win, his will for power, and his desire to do what's right. This conflict reaches its climax in a pivotal decision that Willy makes halfway through and is stylised in the bright light and deep shadows of the cinematography that evokes a world in which the forces of good and evil are in battle and pays homage to the chiaroscuro lighting of classic noir films.
Equally director of photography Kramer Morgenthau's lush cinematography captures affluent offices and soirées in which we can see the money, but not where it comes from, suggesting that such a pretty surface might hide something deeply unpleasant. This is particularly true of the corporate law firm that Willy aspires to join and which morally speaking is positioned between Ted Crawford and Joe Lobrutto in that while the latter two are moral creatures, although poles apart, the corporate law firm is entirely amoral. The ]firm is represented by Pike's character Nikki Gardner, whose alluring performance combines the ambivalence of the femme fatale, the icy enigma of the Hitchcock blonde, whose foreplay hints at carnal depths. In the script at least the patriarchal subtext of original sin common to many noir films (Adam is the first noir protagonist and Eve is the first femme fatale in the myth in which knowledge of good and evil, and moral choice, is introduced to the world) in which the male protagonist's desire for sex, money, knowledge and power is conflated with his desire for a woman who uses his desire to her own ends. Indeed in noir it's usually the powerful patriarch who is explicitly evil, in an inversion of God's role in original sin (thereby positing the world as basically evil rather than basically good), as with John Huston's Noah Cross in Chinatown, while the femme fatale as with Nikki Gardner is more ambiguous: apparently amoral, but inarguably pushed into a position where amorality, rather than a patriarchal morality, may be her only course, making her a quasi-feminist survivor rather than just a Venus man-trap.
Hopkins' melodramatic performance recalls Huston in Chinatown and as in Chinatown, (“Jake, it's Chinatown”): “It's the money, stupid.” When Willy realises that Nikki doesn't care whether Crawford goes free or not he realises how amorality can aid and abet evil and the film becomes an implicit critique of the capitalism that the corporate law firm thrives on, not so much capitalist values as the absence of values at all. This may sound simplistic, schematic or archaic and of course it is, but it lends the film a fable-like quality, and the aforementioned moral didacticism, inherent in noir. While Nikki may subsist in purgatory it's clear that it's Crawford who is going to hell and, as in Chinatown, while the amoral politics of capitalism might allow evil to thrive and become powerful it is human evil that precedes money, not vice versa. Fracture is a diverting thriller, rather darker for the implications that it fails to follow through. It is by no means classic, but it is certainly lifted above the average by entertaining performances from an impressive cast, especially Gosling.
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