After his sweeping successes ‘Cold Mountain’ and ‘The English Patient,’ Anthony Minghella tries something tighter with the inner city drama ‘Breaking and Entering,’ the story of a relationship as wracked by pain as the King’s Cross setting itself.
The mixture of destitute poverty and dead-end social structure is as cruel to its occupants as the institution of marriage is to Will and Amira.
Will (Jude Law—‘Cold Mountain’ and ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’) is the second husband for Liv (Robin Wright Penn) and is trying to patch up her bruised emotions while he patches up the wrecked doors and windows of his beleaguered King’s Cross architecture studio.
If their daughter is the sounding board for his efforts then things are not going well. Although the audience is never let in on the secret, the daughter is distraught 24/7. Not cell-phone and boy-friend-prom distraught but rather hysterical-exercise-pacing-and-screaming distraught. And Liv is not far behind.
After several break-ins at the studio prove that neither Will, his partner nor the local police have the faculties to compete with the gang of thieves, Will joins the screaming match with his step daughter and Liv and they become a tortured chorus that lasts long after the audience has gotten the message.
Although in some circumstances this might be powerful, in this case whether as a result of Mr. Minghella’s directing or script or Mr. Law’s over-acting the effect is tedium.
We don’t know why these people are acting like this, we don’t know why Will can’t secure his studio and we don’t know why Liv’s daughter is crazy.
If the film is trying to move beyond the simple banality of the obvious and get directly at the emotions, we don’t believe the emotions because it all looks phony.
Young actor Gavron does a great job as the alienated youth who is incapable of getting out of the box of his persecution and moving on in the free world. Of course, his gang leader has no interest in helping him out of this state and his counselor is only marginally able to get into Miro’s world enough to make a difference.
Amira and Will collide in a desperate love affair but even the magnetic Binoche is not enough to save the film from its trajectory of miscommunicated hysteria.
The inner city setting of the film is great, a bald and forthright look at a neighborhood that could be anywhere in the world.
Hope, dreams and empowerment live cheek by jowl with poverty, cultural persecution and the nightmare of civilization’s failure to stop the rape, murder and genocide of Bosnia, not to mention Haiti, Somalia and others.
Perhaps the director should have stayed with these themes and left Will and Liv’s hysterical daughter, and most of Will and Liv’s screaming, out of the script. But he didn’t, and the end result for the audience is like being chained in a kindergarten with extremely misbehaving children.
First rate performances by Binoche and Gavron are matched by super supporting work by character actor pro of pros Ray Winstone and one of the funniest side-shows yet by Vera Farmiga.
But this great support is not enough to overcome the distance that persists between Jude Law and the audience. To the bitter end, they simply don’t connect.
Opens Dec. 8. MPAA: Rated R for sexuality and language.
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