My first review for class

This is the first review I wrote my film criticism class, about director Anthony Minghella's new film Breaking and Entering, if anyone is interested in reading it. Today's movie, and next week's review, is the German nominee for the best foreign film Oscar, The Lives of Others.

For now, back to the thesis. *sigh*

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Writer-director Anthony Minghella's three previous films were based on novels that among them had won an Edgar Allen Poe Award, the Booker Prize, and the National Book Award. Perhaps emboldened by his success at transforming classy books into classy films (which earned him Best Screenplay Oscar nominations for The Talented Mr. Ripley and The English Patient), Minghella strikes out on his own with an original screenplay for his new film Breaking and Entering, but proves that perhaps he should stick with the high-toned literary fiction for inspiration.

A departure from the grand scale of several of his previous films, including Cold Mountain in 2003, Breaking and Entering is decidedly small-time, with a plot that would barely support an hour-long TV drama, never mind a two-hour film. In brief: successful architect Jude Law mounts his own investigation into a series of break-ins at his London office, tracks the teenage suspect home and complicates matters by falling for the young man's lonely, wounded mother (Juliette Binoche), while hiding the affair from his long-time partner (Robin Wright Penn). That's about the gist of the story, at once simple and artificial. The film proceeds pretty much exactly you'd expect from that outline, but is larded with so many misguided subplots and big ideas introduced and left dangling that it gives the impression of a short-story collection tossed in a blender.

For starters, the young thief and his mother are refugees from Bosnia, with Binoche's character struggling with the trauma of the war a decade later and the son having fallen in with a poorly-sketched gang led by his family's criminal side. Law's architect is working on a project to revitalize the blighted King's Cross neighborhood where his office is located, prompting many comments that he's made himself a target for crime. Law and Penn bicker over their stalled, decade-long relationship which has yet to result in marriage, and about his alternately warm and cold relationship with Penn's autistic teenage daughter (Poppy Rogers). None of these issues are treated with insight beyond mere platitudes, and few result in any dramatic payoff, since there's no real need for the characters to be Bosnian, autistic, or building a socially controversial project. The details seem designed mostly to prop up the flimsy plot by referencing Important Issues, rather than to move the story along. And I haven't even mentioned the suspicions cast on the office's Carribean cleaning staff after the robbery, the infatuation Law's business partner has with one of the cleaners, a farcical but chaste but encounter with a local prostitute, or the mystifyingly symbolic fox howling in Law's garden. The film shifts gears so often, it should probably have its transmission checked.

Despite having so much going on, it never feels as though there is much of anything at stake in the film. The young burglar's bleak future should he be arrested is unconvincingly discussed several times in what ends up amounting to a central theme, but the question of why we should care about any of these people hangs over the film. An odd sense of pacing doesn't help matters, with major characters dropping out of sight for long stretches of time, only to re-emerge and become less interesting.

All of the narrative clutter would be annoying, but not fatal, if the central storyline was able to build momentum and interest. Unfortunately, the Law-Binoche romance is not only hopelessly contrived, but even baffling. Law chances across Binoche's character on the street (he gives her a towel after she falls in a puddle) shortly before he discovers her son is behind the titular crime. When he scopes out the apartment on the pretense of taking advantage of her home seamstress operation, there's little to suggest he's interested in anything another than finding evidence against her son -- until he kisses her and the film veers off into another direction, where it will remain mired for the rest of its running time. The reason for their attraction is never made clear, apart from rudimentary suggestions that Law's relationship with his girlfriend is on the rocks and Binoche is a beautiful immigrant abroad without a man. Such whisper-thin ideas are hardly enough on which to support an entire film, but that's what Breaking and Entering tries to do. The truth of the story is tough to swallow as it is, but when Law later concocts an even more convoluted fictional version of events in court late in the film, a lawyer speaks for the audience by exclaiming, "Are we supposed to believe this?"

Throughout the film, Law (in his third collaboration with Minghella) is something of a cipher, pleasantly babbling in his foppish Hugh Grant manner while utterly masking the character's real feelings and motivation. How does he feel about his cross-cultural affair, his ostensibly high-minded but potentially problematic community development project, or even his sweet but difficult stepdaughter? If we have any idea, it's mostly guesswork, since Law's unchanging demeanor (and Minghella's script) betrays almost none of the character's thought process. He could be a cad, or well-meaning but confused, or some combination thereof, but mostly he's mysterious, and not in a good way. If only in contrast, Binoche and Penn fare somewhat better, embodying thanklessly limited roles with more believability and charisma that Law is able to provide.

Absent the words of authors like Patricia Highsmith and Charles Frazier to work from, Minghella's screenplay is almost comically clunky. "I don't know how to be honest. I guess that's why I like metaphors, " Law says (really) in one climactic scene. This after painstakingly explaining the concept of the metaphor in earlier scenes to his literal-minded stepdaughter, whose autism prevents her from understanding terms like "fed up." For a script so seemingly concerned with literary devices, it never once displays confidence that the viewer is capable of understanding them. And yet, the film is mistakenly confident that audiences have a desire to see a standard adultery plot recycled once again, with little to distinguish it besides the names on the marquee.