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Features
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Playing the Semi-Good Guy
To inhabit the slippery protagonist of Fracture, actor Ryan Gosling tapped into his experiences with Hollywood agents and the thought of what he himself could become if his showbiz ambitions went unchecked.
Monday, August 13, 2007 at 12:20 PM
By Brett Buckalew
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Jeffrey Mayer/WireImage.com
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Gosling, with sister Mandi
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In mainstream circles, Ryan Gosling is best known as the earnest, charismatic romantic hero of the heart-tugging sleeper The Notebook. But to most critics and art-house patrons, he is recognized as the risk-taking, exceptionally gifted young actor who has played such edgy roles as a self-loathing Jewish neo-Nazi in The Believer and a crack-addicted junior-high teacher in Half Nelson. Gosling’s past attempts at bringing the moodiness of his indie roles into big-studio projects, such as Murder by Numbers and Stay, have failed to excite either Notebook fans or those who love the actor for his more audacious fare.
With the legal thriller Fracture, new this week on DVD, Gosling takes a different approach to marrying the light and dark halves of his screen persona. His character, Willy, an assistant district attorney intent on putting away a brilliant engineer (Anthony Hopkins) who has shot his wife (Embeth Davidtz), is essentially the story’s protagonist, which you couldn’t say about Gosling’s characters in Murder by Numbers or Stay. But if you’re meant to root for Willy, it’s in spite of a number of character flaws that square-jawed crusaders aren’t usually allowed in this kind of wide-appeal thriller.
Possessing a nearly spotless conviction rate, Willy carries himself with a cock-of-the-walk arrogance that is starting to grate on his current boss, the District Attorney (David Strathairn). And with a high-paying corporate job waiting for him once he wraps up his duty to the city, he initially phones in his last criminal case, threatening to set Hopkins’ Crawford free. It’s through his encounters with Crawford’s coma-stricken wife that Willy regains his conscience and his determination to lock Crawford up.
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Ron Galella Ltd.
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Director Gregory Hoblit
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“He’s the ‘good guy’ in the movie, but he’s not really good,” Gosling analyzes of Willy during a recent interview with FilmStew. “He’s just not bad, and that’s fine with him. But he’s naturally a pretty narcissistic, selfish, superficial guy. He reminded me of some agents I’ve met.”
Willy’s self-love and drive to make as much money as he can does make him a character who would be as at home in Hollywood as he is in the courtroom. For Gosling, an actor who no one could accuse of selling out, these parallels gave him a chance to explore his repressed inner materialist.
“I think living in this town, some of that rubs off on you,” he admits. “It’s really hard to fight it. There’s a lot of erosion that takes place in this town, and I think in a way, it’s fun to do an extreme version of things that you’re afraid of becoming.”
Luckily, Gosling also had an industry role model on the Fracture set, in the form of acting legend and Silence of the Lambs Oscar winner Hopkins. “You could have a lottery - and every actor would enter it - to sit down at a table with Anthony Hopkins and to do a scene,” Gosling raves of his co-star. “I didn’t want to get into some kind of act-off with him, but it’s difficult because I’m such a fan of his that I’m always watching him and enjoying what he’s doing.”
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Jeffrey Mayer/WireImage.com
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Co-star Embeth Davidtz
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Like his idol, Gosling has also gotten a seal of approval from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. This year, he received his first Best Actor Oscar nomination for his electric turn in Half Nelson. For Gosling, the awards recognition was more valuable for the joy it brought his family than for the competitive aspect of being pitted against his peers.
“You can’t pick who’s best, or what’s best,” the actor observes. “It’s all subjective. It’s whatever. It is what it is. But…it meant a lot to the people that love me, and [to] the people that I love. And being able to be a part of some kind of celebration that is really for your family is a great thing, and it ended up being a really beautiful time.”
When asked if the knowledge this past film awards season that The Last King of Scotland’s Forest Whitaker was a clear front-runner for every Best Actor race on the planet alleviated the pressure to win, Gosling freely confesses, “Yeah, I never had to worry about having to say anything. I’d go, collect the gift bag, enjoy the food, smile for the camera. It was easy!”
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Jeffrey Mayer/WireImage.com
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Hopkins, with wife Stella
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Speaking of smiling for the camera, even the performer’s biggest fans are surely curious if he’ll do much more of that in the future, considering how grim and dramatically intense his choice of roles tends to be. But when addressing the consistent seriousness of his resume, Gosling self-deprecatingly explains, “Look, I was younger. I was full of angst. I had watched too many James Dean movies. I’m getting older, and my feelings about things are different.”
“Also, I love comedies,” he adds. “When I was a kid, I grew up on Abbot and Costello movies, and those things are masterpieces!”
Making Gosling’s claims credible is the fact that he has a comedy of a very unconventional sort coming out this fall: Lars and the Real Girl, co-starring Patricia Clarkson and Emily Mortimer. “It’s sort of in the vein of a Hal Ashby movie, like Being There or Harold and Maude,” Gosling reveals. “And it’s a really beautiful love story, and you’re gonna laugh, but [it’s] about a guy who’s completely in love with a sex doll and believes that she is real and has a whole love affair with her. And so it’s this really unique little movie that I can’t really describe.”
It doesn’t sound like the kind of thing that will play in Peoria to Notebook numbers. But who knows? Considering Ashby’s luck with guiding Best Actor nominees (Being There’s Peter Sellers, eventually victorious Jon Voight in Coming Home), the Ashby-esque Lars may lead to a second consecutive nomination for Gosling, an outcome we’re sure the actor will be fine with, mainstream respect or no.
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