Missing the Forest For the Moss on One of the Trees
It always surprises me when people tell me about an idea they’ve had or a script they’ve written and it turns out they don’t grasp what’s most interesting about it. Imagine if David Koepp started writing Jurassic Park and got sidetracked by the story of some tax auditors trying to find out where all the money went, or if Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana decided Brokeback Mountain was really about a cowboy and his mortage. Those alternate versions don’t sound very interesting, do they? Well, I can’t tell you about screenplays I’ve read in confidence, but last night I watched Fracture on DVD, and boy howdy did that train ever get derailed.
Fracture, for those of you who don’t know, stars the great Anthony Hopkins as Ted Crawford, a brililant engineer who murders his cheating wife, confesses the crime to the cop she’s been sleeping with, and then pulls the rug out from under Ryan Gosling’s Willy Beachum, the young hotshot assistant district attorney he’s carefully selected to be his opponent in court. You see, it turns out that the gun he supposedly shot her with has never been fired and the confession he signed was coerced, and now it looks like he’s going to get off scott free. But where did he hide the weapon he actually shot his wife with? Why is it so important to him that this particular assistant D.A. handle his case? What’s really going on? These are all intriguing mysteries, and they would have held our interest quite handily if only the filmmakers knew to focus on them. Instead, we get a lot of irrelevant personal material about Beachum’s humble beginnings and his attempts to move up in the world and secure a high-paying private-sector job after his stint in public service, none of which has anything to do with the story. The story is rooted in the villain’s plan, and in Fracture, the villain’s plan is to kill his wife and get away with it, not to foil some other guy’s attempt to make a lot of money and live the good life.
In fact, Beachum doesn’t even wind up having any particular reason to be there. Despite all the sound and fury to the contrary, he has nothing to do with the villain’s plan; any assistant D.A. would’ve done just fine. Imagine, though, if Crawford had had a very specific and necessary reason for selecting Beachum — one that depended on Beachum’s acess to his high-powered new employer and his determination to hold onto his new job at any cost. Then Crawford would have been exploiting Beachum’s greed and ambition in order to pull off his perfect murder, and the external conflict, over Crawford’s attempt to get away with killing his wife, would have been directly and organically tied to the internal conflict, between Beachum’s base desire to make lots of money and his more noble aspiration to put criminals behind bars. That would’ve made for a great story. Alas for Fracture — and for us — that it wasn’t written that way.
Tags: Anthony Hopkins, Focus, Fracture, Gregory Hoblit, Inner Conflict, Ryan Gosling, Stakes, Villain's Plan