Fragments DVD: Review By Brian Gallagher

A lot of times, I don't have my fellow critics' backs when it comes to a lot of artsier fare. Two years ago, I believe, the "best-reviewed film" of the year, according to those aggregators at Rotten Tomatoes, was Once. I absolutely despised and hated that film, giving it 1 star out of 5 when they torturously sent the DVD to me to review. So, when I was sent Fragments to review, I took one look at the cast and thought, at least, this had promise... only to realize the only promise was boredom and time wasted on this terrible film.

The film starts out in a quaint California diner, not that unlike the diner in Pulp Fiction. Like Pulp Fiction, some crazy crap goes down in this diner but, unlike Pulp Fiction that uses the events in the diner for one part of the brilliant story, the whole story of Fragments, in many ways, takes place right in that diner. See, it's just a normal day at the diner. A waitress, Carla (Kate Beckinsale) is talking on her cell phone, waiting for the end of her shift, while an impatient customer, Charlie (Forest Whitaker) just wants to place an order. A doctor, Bruce (Guy Pearce) grabs a quick cup of coffee before heading to work and there's a young girl, Anne (Dakota Fanning) with her dad (Tim Guinee) and the girl's friend, Jimmy (Josh Hutcherson) all about to enjoy their meal. Then, BAM! A dude walks in and opens fire in the diner for no particular reason. Charlie gets shot in the neck, but lives, and the gunman kills Anne's dad, while Anne and Jimmy are hiding under the table. He kills a few other people that aren't on the call sheet and then takes his own life. Crazy, eh? No, I know, not really... So yeah. The film is basically about these five characters - the waitress Carla, the customer Charlie, the doctor Bruce and the young kids Anne and Jimmy - and the ways that they cope with this tragedy... which are incredibly messed up.

I'll get the good stuff out of the way first. There is an AMAZING cast here, and whatever stars I have given the film are for their collective performances. Beckinsale is almost unrecognizable as Carla, and gives a terrific performance and Dakota Fanning is so good in here that I almost wished I would've seen this before her awkward, 13-going-on-30 turn in Push. Forest Whitaker is amazing, as always, and Guy Pearce gives a fairly-straightforward but nicely nuanced performance here. That's not all, either. We get some solid supporting turns from Jackie Earle Haley as Jimmy's hard-nosed, old-fashioned father, Jeanne Tripplehorn as Anne's mother, the underrated Troy Garity as a community grief counselor, Jennifer Hudson as Charlie's daughter, Kevin Durand as a loan shark enforcer and even one of my favorites from my favorite TV show EVER, The Shield, Walton Goggins as an (ex?) boyfriend of Carla. I'm sure right know you might be thinking that you might be willing to risk seeing this movie with such an amazing and diverse cast, but, if you do... don't say I didn't warn you. It's not the amazing cast that's the problem: it's everything else.

For one, the script was written by Roy Freirich, his first screenplay and, even more troublesome, he adapted this screenplay from his own book, Winged Creatures (which is apparently the film's official title on IMDB, even though the DVD was sold under Fragments). While there have been authors who have successfully adapted their own work in the past, it's generally something that's not seen as often, for good reason. I haven't read the book Winged Creatures, but this story, the way it's told here, is much MUCH better suited for the literary world than the film world because it's not harnessed by runtime limitations and you can flesh out characters and situations to your heart's content with just the written word. Then again, if the book features these kinds of unconscionable situations, then maybe I don't want to read it after all.

The film basically shows how each of these five characters who survived the diner slayings are coping and dealing with their experience. The problem is these people all do such reprehensible things that the ability to feel compassion for the characters and relate to their ordeal goes right out the window because of how they behave. The most tame of these is Forest Whitaker's Charlie, who relapses from his former gambling habit and goes on a casino bender (and even that gets pretty bad at the end), but then we get Carla, who keeps neglecting her child so she'll be sick, and give her a reason to see the hunky doctor Bruce, who she's sure, in her mind, has a thing for her. The good doctor himself isn't so innocent because he's drugging his wife's food so she'll get headaches and he can "save" her by giving her some drugs that will cure her headache. He does this, of course, because he's so traumatized that he couldn't save any of the victims from the coffee shop and feels that he has to save something, no matter how f&^*ed up the methods are. Now, you might be thinking I'm a bit hard on this film, and that people have done far worse things in movies. You'd be right that far worse things have been done... but those things are normally done out of such dire straights like life-or-death situations, or to avoid going to prison. In Fragments they're doing these terrible things because... they saw people get shot in front of them? Give me a friggin break...

I've seen this film compared to Crash, but that comparison has only the tiniest shred of merit. Crash, and even to an extent, Magnolia, deal with seemingly random people whose lives intersect in bizarre ways. There are all these characters that start off on completely different ends of the spectrum and, by the end of the film, they're all connected in profound ways. Fragments is the complete opposite. The film revolves around a singular event that all these characters start out at, and it tracks their separate paths OUT from that event, instead of them all coming in. Fragments shows each character's individual journey after the slaughter in the diner, and then they "artfully" intercut different "fragments" from that event, from different viewpoints, and by the end you finally "get" the full picture. While the full picture might be complete at the end, it doesn't change the fact that this film charts the paths of these characters coming out of that event, separately, not them all coming back in.

Fragments is quite simply one of the worst movies I've seen this year. This quirky, artsy flavor that they try to portray is drowned out by characters you not only don't care about, but wish they were the ones killed in that diner. Simply a dreadful film.

Aside from a director's commentary track, there's nothing to see here, folks.

The film is presented in the widescreen format, enhanced for 16x9 televisions.

The sound is handled through the Dolby Digital Surround Sound format.

Actually, not too bad of a job here, since the front cover does grab your attention. The front features shots of Beckinsale, Whitaker, Fanning, Hudson and Pearce, each in their little shattered glass fragment thing, with a hole in the glass that shows the sappy tagline "One moment shattered their lives." Also there's a critic quote that, to me, is unbelievably inaccurate. Bah. The back has a shot of Beckinsale and Whitaker, another critic quote (Bah), a "special feature" box that just says "Includes Director Commentary" along with four random images, the billing block and tech specs.

While I do see what they're getting at here with Fragments, it's just not my cup of tea at all. It's a boring film that shows us some of the most unfathomable things I've ever seen, when it comes to dealing with how people grieve and cope with tragedy.