Fracture

I must confess I remember little about this film, other than Ryan Gosling wasn't very good in it ("well...he got better!"). This review—trying very hard to be spoiler-free isn't much help in remembering. It was written at the time of the film's release...

 

Fracture (Gregory Hoblit, 2007) Gregory Hoblit has had a long career shepherding quality television work as a co-executive producer/writer/director on such shows as "Hill Street Blues," and "L.A. Law." He can be counted on to lend an air of verisimilitude to his legal films (though when he strays off-court into such films as Hart's War, he brings no real style to the proceedings--even though there was an extended trial scene in the Bruce Willis/Colin Farrell P.O.W. film). 

 

But he does have an unerring eye for talent as his Primal Fear was a fine showcase for Laura Linney, Andre Braugher, and especially Edward Norton, all eclipsing star Richard Gere.

 

The cast for Fracture is just as impressive with great character actors like Fiona Shaw, David Strathairn, and Bob Gunton lending strong supporting roles. But the film is a bit too "legal procedural" for its own good. Let's see what legal cliches can we trot out:

- the cocky upstart lawyer (Ryan Gosling) just begging for a come-uppence: ✔

- the cocky genius (Anthony Hopkins) using the legal system for his own ends: ✔

- the distracting affair with a legal superior (Rosamund Pike) that throws said "upstart" off his game: ✔

- the mentor (Straithairn) who warns "upstart" every step of the way, while secretly pulling for the kid because he has such "pluck:" ✔

- the legal maneuvering that twists a seemingly open-and-shut court case into a series of technicalities that derail any sense of justice: ✔

- the tony upscale-silvery locations that serve as contrast (and siren call) to the "upstart's" stuffy offices of wood-panels and metal desks: ✔

- the red herring revealed only at the end which casts a different light on the whole proceedings: ✔

Will the clichés please rise while the judge enters the chambers?

Ultimately what it comes down to is an acting duel between old war-horse Hopkins, and "new turk" Gosling, and there it's no contest. Hopkins can do more just leaning back in his chair and stretching his neck suggesting megalomania than any actor doing movies. Hopkins has bags of tricks he hasn't gotten to yet. Gosling, then, tries to match him by going the opposite route--doing too much so that his legal eagle looks jittery and scattered; Gosling's busy performance reminds one of the bizarre early work of Nicolas Cage--too much over-thinking the part, and trying too hard to get noticed, that one is distracted by the tic's in the foreground to notice any subtleties that might be working. By the ending of the film, Gosling settles down, but it comes off as too little (finally) coming too late.

Europa Report

Europa Report (]Sebastián Cordero, 2013)  Sci-fi/adventure film crossing several styles of film-making, but primarily done in a faux-documentary/found footage style about a long-range NASA flight to the Jupiter moon of Europa, which, it has been speculated by many looking at it from afar and across many different spectra, is the most likely of our neighborhood system's bodies that could, maybe, possibly support life as we know it (if all the ingredients and conditions necessary for it outweigh everything that would prevent it).

The whole thing is staged like a documentary. There are pre-flight press conference archives, post-event footage of interviews (giving us a nice sense of complacency), some scrambled interference to give us the "fallible narrator" idea, and lots and lots of "normalcy" footage (something that proved useful to The Martian, which makes Europa Report, seem less of a waste of space in presentation). 

The other thing that's neat about it, is that NASA advisers worked with the film-makers to give it a sense of verisimilitude.  The gear is "lowest-contract-bidder" looking, we get a sense of the routine (just so we can tell when it gets broken), and we become acquainted with the various camera set-ups that record what's going on automatically. It looks very authentic, much more so than misfires like that lousy Apollo 18 movie a couple years back, or even the clever Ridley Scott "transmission" footage used to hide the scale models and flaws in its "planet-side" footage in Alien. 

The film is cast well and game, maybe a little too game, as you don't get the sense that these guys are astronauts or pilots or physicists or ice geologists or whatever they're supposed to be.  But, any more casual "reading you five-by-five, Houston" and you wouldn't have been able to distinguish one from the other at all, and that wouldn't do well with what the film wants to do, which one will become aware of fairly early on in the proceedings. It does cast a couple of fairly well known "anonymous" actors—in other words, it's not George Clooney, Sandra Bullock or Brad Pitt—but it is Michael Nyqvist (from the first versions of the "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" series) and Sharlto Copley (of District 9, The A-Team, and Elysium) Embeth Davidtz (of Schindler's List, Army of Darkness and "Mad Men"), and Karolina Wydra (she was briefly Mrs. House on "House, M.D."), all very good international actors that few would recognize. A good strategy, that, even if it does make it it a little hard to keep track of everybody.

And that's the main problem, here. The story is pretty standard stuff in the murder/horror realm, as we lose crew-members one by one, a sort of "Ten Little Astronauts". But by how or by what, we have no idea in a world of possibilities (other than the age-old problem of everybody ignoring the transmission to "get back in"). Ultimately, this is what limits Europa Report, despite the fact that its intention is to expand our horizons and conceptions. We know what's going to happen. We know how it's going to end. And whatever great discovery and what it might mean to our ideas of the Universe as put out by the film are overshadowed by the rote way in which its conveyed. Any uniqueness is swallowed by convention.

Which makes you wonder: if we do find life in the Universe besides us, is our reaction going to be: "Uh-huh, so what else is new?"