I saw two very well-made films this weekend, Fracture and Disturbia. Both are stylish big studio productions, and show Hollywood polish to good advantage. Both films could be categorized as suspense, the former being a courtroom drama, the latter being a thriller. Both treat of crime: cold-blooded spousal murder and serial killers, respectively. Fracture features old hand (hack? master?) Anthony Hopkins chewing up the screen as the bad guy, as only he can, set against comparative newcomer Ryan Gosling as his prosecutor; Disturbia features a young actor, Shia LaBeouf, playing an 18-year-old under house arrest, suspecting neighbor David Morse of murder. Each film adds a love interest, and each has moments of white-knuckle suspense. Both did very well this weekend at the box office. And yet only one of them strikes me as worth recommending. It is not the one I expected.

What I expected was that Disturbia would be a somewhat vexing remake of Rear Window. Yes, the set-up is similar to the Hitchcock classic, and the nature of the suspense is similar. But there's enough originality here that I wasn't quite sure what was going to happen. Though, yes, I knew that the David Morse character was going to turn out to be a truly bad guy.

The Anthony Hopkins character is convicted in the viewers' eyes from the get-go. And he does indeed murder his wife. The crime in question is not a whodunnit, but a willhegetawaywithit. Or perhaps a howwillhegetawaywithit. The trouble with the movie is very easy to state: the key plot device of the character's own plotting, though kept from view, was obvious to me. I figured it out as the crime scene unfolded. So it was somewhat vexing to watch the Ryan Gosling character not figure it out.

Of course, the subplot regarding the prosecutor's new cushy private-sector position, and the consequent romance with his new boss (this, I tell you, seemed not wholly realistic), was there to both explain how this ace lawyer could miss the truth and add a red herring for audience pleasure.

Still, it was fun watching the case unravel, and it was fun watching the beleaguered prosecutor put it back together again, after all seemed lost.

The love interest in the film, played by Rosamund Pike, might be one of most strikingly beautiful white women working in film today. She is fun to watch, and it is satisfying, in its own way, to see her relationship to the hero go through an arc, not merely up the predictable staircase to happily-ever romance.

In Disturbia the love interest is played by Sarah Roemer, whom I'd never seen before. Cute and sexy, there are a number of lingering sequences where the camera lingers over her bikini-clad body. More cute than beautiful, in some ways, and not used as exploitatively in the plot climax as I would have suspect . . . a refreshing element in the film, really, almost a classy pull-back of the opening gambit, featuring (as it does) lust and danger in equal mixture.

It may be that this late-teen thriller, this rear-front-and-side window voyeurism exercise bares less than thought than Fractured, but the thought that it elicits does not hurt the film, whereas that's precisely the problem in Fractured.

Indeed, the only reason Fractured works at all is Hopkins. He so fills up the screen that he helps distract the viewer (or, I suspect, most viewers) from the problems in the plot. Ryan Gosling's acting, on the other hand, is itself distracting in the opposite way. I've never seen an actor touch his face so often onscreen . . . that is, other than the zombies in Grindhouse, who pop their pustules for the sake of mass infection.

Both Fracture and Disturbia prove variants on the classic romance, as defined by Jack Woodford: boy meets girl, girl gets boy into pickle, boy gets pickle into girl. In each case, in these modern storylines, it is the boy who gets himself into the pickle. And in each case, the other pickle finds its natural end. To show that Fractured is the more adult of the two, the latter pickle action takes place in the development of the main-pickle plot. To show a more standard storyline, the final pickle placement in Disturbia takes place offscreen as the credits roll, in the traditional happily-ever-after realm.

Leave a comment

Comments:

No Comments for this post yet...

Leave a comment:

Name:

Email:

Your email address will not be displayed on this site.

Site/Url:

Your URL will be displayed.

Comment text:

Allowed XHTML tags: <p, ul, ol, li, dl, dt, dd, address, blockquote, ins, del, span, bdo, br, em, strong, dfn, code, samp, kdb, var, cite, abbr, acronym, q, sub, sup, tt, i, b, big, small>

Options:

Auto-BR (Line breaks become <br />)
Remember me (Set cookies for name, email and url)
Allow message form (Allow users to contact you through a message form (your email will NOT be displayed.))

Pingbacks:

No Pingbacks for this post yet...