Tragic in so many ways
When a lone gunman walks into a diner and takes the lives of customers before he takes his own, the survivors are left piecing together their own lives. Each survivor must deal with the tragic day in his or her own way and each way is very much different from one another. One girl finds God, one man has nothing to lose, one man blames himself for not doing anything and one woman is simply lost trying to figure things out in a scattered mess.
Fragments is a tough film. I wasn’t sure how tough this was going to be, but I knew it was going to be tough. The moment the movie opens and you see the diner so full of life, you are basically given a starting point to where life ended for all these folks. The moment proceeding the shooting everyone seems changed forever. Instead of being a part of the world they lived in they are literally separated from it. It’s a powerful tool for the film to possess. Director Rowan Woods certainly defined this moment quite loudly as each character is set to wander into a world they no longer know. For example, Forest Whitaker’s character Charlie hs just found out that he has prostate cancer. While sitting at the diner trying to get a barring on his life, the shooting occurs. Immediately after being hospitalized, he quickly escapes and starts to think about how he needs to prepare for his untimely departure from the world. He goes gambling to make money for his child’s future. He does all of this on the basis of ‘luck’. He was lucky to be alive with cancer, lucky to be alive after the shooting and just plain lucky enough to succeed in gambling (there is a downside eventually). He stops playing it safe and his life disconnects from its original route. All the stories in the movie create this disconnect with Kate Beckinsale’s being the worst (I won’t go into that; I simply can’t).
So the shattering of lives in the film is well done. You cannot get a more powerful statement then what Woods created when he sent everyone’s life spiraling. With that said, here’s the issue I had with the film. Once the lives were set off track they never truly came back together. I know that we’re suppose to assume that their lives can’t be the same after what they’ve all witnessed and experienced, but the closures seem a bit false. I’m not sure if it was a script change or Woods simply ran out of time, but there has to be some sort of smoothing out and the smoothing out didn’t go too well. It seemed a bit rushed and this huge tragedy that befell all of the characters didn’t really have any sort of resolution. Of course, if that’s what Woods was looking for then bravo, but I would like to think that it meant more than emptiness. The idea of an ongoing, forever disconnect is certainly way to tragic to imagine. While I’ve never been part of a tragedy of such a nature, there has to be some closure somewhere.
Anyway, the movie is worth a gander and just be forewarned that it’s incredibly depressing and uncomfortable at times. That’s what makes it powerful, though.