Like most of America, I missed Fracture in theaters. It's really a very capable courtroom/procedural howdunnit. It likely inspired an "I'll catch it on cable" from those who saw the trailer. Most people are accustomed to things procedurals like Fracture on TV, not as much in the cinema. It came out on DVD & Blu-ray back in the middle of June, and I'm only just catching up with it. I'm a sucker for courtroom thrillers, which I blame on all the time I spent doing Speech & Debate in school.
Anthony Hopkins plays Ted Crawford, a genius mechanical engineer whose wife (Embeth Davidtz) unapologetically cheats on him. He shoots her, and does a near-perfect job of covering it up. Ryan Gosling plays hotshot Assistant District Attorney Willy Beachum, who has rarely lost a case. Willy is ready to jump ship from public service to corporate law when he's stuck prosecuting the Crawford case. No matter how hard he tries, Willy is trumped by Crawford at every turn. In stock component terms, this movie is very much The Lawyer Gets a Soul combined with The Madman Genius Commits a Crime.
Hopkins' niche talent for playing sinister geniuses may make this movie look like a retread. No, it's nothing like Silence of the Lambs, but it is on the same order as Instinct: very well-crafted and well-acted. David Strathairn plays Gosling's boss, Rosamund Pike his boss-to-be/lover Nikki, and Bob Gunton shows up as Pike's father, a judge. Cliff Curtis does solid work in this as he did in Crossing Over. There's not as much for him to do here, but he's still good. I wish more people saw the movies he's in.
The combination of Hopkins and Gosling was already enough to get me to put it in my "someday" stack. The thing that really compelled me to look at the disc was the pair of Test Screening Alternate Endings at around eleven minutes each. They're very closesly-related versions of one another, with neither woking as well as the final one. There is no Commentary present nor a Behind-the-Scenes featurette to reveal how the cut of the movie evolved. The only clues are in those vastly inferior previous endings and the collection of Alternate and Deleted Scenes.
A couple scenes are alternate versions of an inferred love scene from the final version are included, which don't work as well as what was finally used. The extended/alternate introduction to Willy is likewise not great. The scene with Willy carrying Nikki downstairs characterizes her as more of a little girl in a lawyer's body than Pike's performance otherwise indicates. Had it been left in, Nikki would have just been some girl from The Hills who slept her way through law school.
Director Gregory Hoblit (Primal Fear) is great with courtroom drama material, and this is no exception. I think it's really almost impossible to rewrite the rules of the genre without blending it (courtroom horror or stop-motion animation, anyone?). The movie is worth a watch, whether renting/Netflixing or purchasing.
