Breaking and Entering: Movie & DVD Review (2006)

(Originally published 2006)

The new Anthony Minghella movie, "Breaking and Entering," follows one unhappily married man seeking to reclaim passion in his life and one emotionally damaged woman who acquiesces to his advances, though she knows she shouldn't.

<>How they come together is as contrived as it is passionless.

From Minghella's own script, "Breaking and Entering" could have been titled "Glum Rooms with Long Faces," particularly thanks to a weirdly expressionless performance by Robin Wright Penn, whose character looks and behaves as if they just wheeled her out of the morgue. Watching her here, one longs to check her toes for a tag, but I digress.

The film stars Jude Law as Will Francis, a London-based landscape architect who lives in a posh Kensington pad with longtime girlfriend Liv (Penn), a Swedish-American who used to make documentaries back when she was happy.

Also living with them is Liv's 13-year-old daughter, Bea (Poppy Rogers), whose struggle with autism consumes much of Liv's life. The rest of Liv's time is either spent with her face dipped into a light box (it lessens her depression) or arguing with Will, with whom she has lost touch.

Each is aware of the growing chasm between them, but neither is particularly moved into action to fix it. They're rich, they're dull, they're restless--and you sense there's a small part of them that rather likes it that way.

At work, Will has other problems. After relocating his architectural firm to London's sketchy King's Cross section, which is in flux due to urban renewal, he is the victim of two burglaries, which the police have not solved.

Taking matters into his own hands, he stakes out the property and--after a few amusing interludes with a pushy prostitute (Vera Farmiga)--he finds his thief in Miro (Rafi Gavron), the acrobatic son of Bosnian refugee Amira (Juliette Binoche). Instead of busting Miro, Will naturally takes a shine to his mother, a smoldering affair ignites between them, complications ensue.

The trouble is that the complications aren't very interesting, though the relationship between Amira and Miro is. Here is the story on which Minghella should have focused--the dynamics between a single, working-class mother who fled her country during the Bosnian war and how she's on the cusp of losing her son to the streets of London, which, mirroring her family, is in a state of transition. We get moments of that story here, but suffocating it are Will, Liv and Bea, who are protected by privilege and thus never really at the same level of risk as Amira and Miro.

Minghella's aim is to have us pull for all of them, which is difficult to do when you don't like three of them. Since his movie also is about mending class differences, he manufactures a hopeful ending that wants to have it all--just as he wants his London to have it all--but which instead only rings false.

Grade: C-