FRAGMENTS
Directed by Rowan Woods
Produced by Robert Salerno
Written by Roy Freirich, based on his novel Winged Creatures
Released by Peace Arch Entertainment
USA. 100 min. Rated R
With Kate Beckinsale, Forest Whitaker, Dakota Fanning, Guy Pearce, Embeth Davidtz, Troy Garity, Jackie Earle Haley, Jennifer Hudson, Jeanne Tripplehorn & Josh Hutcherson
 

There is nothing particularly American about a murderous rampage. Our country may be awash in firearms—200 million of them, in fact—but the past few years have taught us that killing sprees can happen even in gun-shy places like Belgium, Japan, and, especially, Finland, which hosted horrific school shootings in 2007 and 2008. Because mass killings strike unpredictably, they feel less like crimes and more like natural disasters, either the acts of an inscrutable God or proof that one does not exist.

Fragments, a puerile yet disturbing drama directed by the Australian filmmaker Rowan Woods (Little Fish), invites us to witness one such mass murder in a Los Angeles diner. We see a gunman enter, kill people, and then shoot himself. At first, the violence is shown obliquely. Then, as days pass and each survivor’s inner world unravels, the movie flashes back to the diner. We are shown the shooting, over and over again, with a decreasing measure of restraint. The “R” rating sells short the impact of the violence, which takes so much out of us and offers so little in return: no pathos, no catharsis, only a simulacrum of drama. This might be intentional—the confusion we feel at the film’s end hints at the senselessness of such killings—but there are clues that the action is intended to make us feel something other than empty.

When the smoke clears, the survivors have been unsurprisingly shaken. Two teens have lost their father. One (Dakota Fanning) turns intensely to God, the other (Josh Hutcherson) becomes mute. A degenerate gambler with cancer (Forest Whitaker), wounded in the shooting, now feels he has even less to lose; he sets out for the casino. A waitress (Kate Beckinsale) loses the will to take care of her infant daughter. A slick doctor (Guy Pearce) tries and fails to work miracles.

That Fragments is a failure is not so much the fault of bad filmmaking. The actors convincingly occupy their characters, the editing gives the film a brisk, engaging pace, and the score, by Marcelo Zarvos, is appropriately gloomy. But as is so often the case lately, the writing shrinks from its subject. Just like in Shrink, another tersely-titled ensemble drama that opened last week, the film has no propulsion beyond its premise. It made me want to take a vacation.

Toward the end, there’s a kind of thematic summation courtesy of Ms. Fanning’s character, who has lurched from born-again Christianity back to suburban agnosticism—but still speaks with an eerie, catechistic certitude. No annotation is required to reveal the narrative laziness behind her lines: “Everything has a place and believing in that makes us innocent. And through the days, under the same sky, we hope and dream and laugh. We find and lose our way. Endings are beginnings. And moments, like pieces, fit together again.” Sigh. It’s almost as if Dylan Klebold could be explained away by a Hallmark card.  Stephen Heyman
July 31, 2009