Film
Close to home
by Philip Matthews
Whether movie producer and director Larry Parr’s low-budget enterprise Kahukura collapsed through bad luck or mismanagement isn’t something we’ll go into here, but if it’s the former, then bad luck still haunts Parr like a ghost. Try this: when the long-delayed Fracture, adapted from Maurice Gee’s novel Crime Story, finally gets a release date, it is within the post-festival afterglow of the film that will inevitably overshadow it – Brad McGann’s far, far superior Gee adaptation, In My Father’s Den. In the future, McGann’s film will be the main story and Parr’s the footnote.
Both films share a Gee-world of frayed families, fundamentalist nutters and accidental crimes. But where McGann’s film is tightly focused on two characters, Fracture tries to gather half of Wellington in a net – you need to go into this movie with a flow chart and a family tree to understand how character A connects to character Z. Presumably, those advance descriptions of this film as “Lantana-like” were about finding a polite way to call its tangled relationships muddy and incoherent.
Very simply put, Brent Rosser (Jared Turner) robs the Kelburn home of Ulla Peet (Jennifer Ward-Lealand) and, from there, the fortunes of the Rossers and the Peets are tenuously linked, or at least played out in parallel. There is so much rich material here, straight from the book – those great names: Athol Peet, Clyde Rosser, Mrs Ponder – and a really good evocation of Wellington social classes and geography, from that solid Kelburn home in the steep hills above the university to the vast tracts of houses in the Hutt Valley to the Wellington railway yards, which are rendered as a kind of carnivalesque underworld, that you can only wish that the film had a director more capable of organising that material. And more capable of generating some momentum: no film (originally) titled Crime Story should be this sluggish, this suspense-less, this – in one word – boring.
When the Peet/Rosser connections do eventually tighten, or correspond, the feeling is less of the “cosmic” significance summoned by similar moments in, say, Magnolia than a view that Wellington sure is one tiny and incestuous village. In Wellington it’s not meaningful that the husband of the attacked woman is the landlord of the attacker, it’s just drearily possible – just as you’re immediately convinced when a rich patriarch (John Noble), whose mansion has views over the harbour, says that he was once merely “a chippy from Wainui”. The saddest thing about Fracture’s failure, though, is the number of good performances that it throws away: not just Michael Hurst, who plays Athol Peet as the kind of small, efficient, ordinary man that movies usually overlook, or Jared Turner, whose increasingly desperate Brent is like a cornered rat, or Paul Glover’s thuggish Danny, but Kate Elliott, whose Leeanne Rosser, Brent’s sister and a struggling, combative solo mother, is the only truly alive thing in it.
FRACTURE, directed by Larry Parr.
