Anthony Minghella (2006)
Watching Anthony Minghella’s last cinema feature – he made only The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency for the BBC subsequently – is an unhappy experience. You can’t help thinking about Minghella’s premature death and that this meant that, to be honest, his body of work as a director doesn’t amount to much. He obviously enjoyed his greatest success with The English Patient although The Talented Mr Ripley (particularly the first half) is his best movie. Truly, Madly, Deeply is a drag, Cold Mountain a stinker. As always, Minghella wrote the script too – his first original screenplay since Truly, Madly, Deeply. For a good part of Breaking and Entering, I felt that he was trying to do something interesting even if it wasn’t really working. By the end I wasn’t even sure what he’d wanted to do.
The time and place in which the film is set are specific – King’s Cross in the early years of the new millennium. Will lives with his Swedish-American girlfriend Liv and her apparently autistic teenage daughter Bea. The girl’s irregular sleeping and eating and largely asocial behaviour – her waking hours are devoted to practising gymnastics – are putting an increasing strain on the relationship. Will and his business partner Sandy are landscape architects – ‘creating public spaces for King’s Cross’. There are serial break-ins at their offices, carried out by Slavic immigrants. They steal computers mainly but the lynchpin of the burglaries, a teenage schoolboy called Miro, is also taken with and pockets a few of the little figures used by the architects for scale models of buildings. Miro is the son of a Bosnian refugee Amira, a seamstress. (Her Serbian husband died in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.) Because the intruders evidently know the code to stop the burglar alarm, Will and Sandy decide that the only way of avoiding further robberies is to be their own nightwatchmen on the premises. During one vigil an Eastern European prostitute called Oana appears on the scene, wearing a fur coat and nothing underneath. She strikes up a relationship (although it never involves sex) with Will. Minghella appears to want to create a socially and ethnically diverse group of characters then to describe the particular relationships and dilemmas that develop in the interaction of these people.
This sounds like the basis of a good picture and some of the early signs are promising. Minghella easily establishes the multicultural community – there’s a nice brief scene in a bingo hall, where the punters are mainly dressed in burkhas (Amira, also a Muslim, is there in Western clothes). Miro scales the walls of the architects’ offices and enters from above. His acrobatic leaps are great to watch and rhyme with shots of Bea’s relentless somersault routines. A dilapidated fox skulks round the neighbourhood and his barking gives Will the willies. Although the relationship between him and Liv is lifeless, their first attempts to analyse it are well written. But Minghella is so anxious to bring the characters together that he forces the story. Will conceals from Amira (and the police) that he’s discovered that Miro is the burglar. The social-ethnic perspective of the picture comes to feel like the fish before the meat, and the development of the relationships is disappointingly trite. Eventually, even what seemed like good bits are compromised in retrospect. Will tells Oana about the worrying fox: she tells him ‘It’s the one wild thing in your life’ and, after stealing and eventually returning his car, leaves in it a fox fur boa. The scene in which Will and Amira first bump into each other is well staged and played but the fact that he happens to be there for the sake of Bea’s gymnastics and she because Miro is keeping himself in shape for burglaries connects the teenagers’ different physical exercises in a neat, limiting way. There’s an excess of dialogue – Will, who at one point admits his tendency to long-windedness (he’s sententious too – ‘Perhaps that’s why I think in metaphors’), is not the only offender.
A scene like the one in which Will is talking with work colleagues on a building site with Bea playing around in the background is really careless. When Will sees the girl clambering up a high and precarious pile of materials, he tells her to get down and to stay with the young woman who’s keeping an eye on her. Will is so preoccupied with Bea that he’s not listening to what his colleagues are saying; he then – suddenly – becomes lost in thought so that he’s not concerned about the girl either. Nor it seems is the supervisor and Bea duly has an accident that leaves her in hospital. The only good reason for Will’s withdrawing into himself at this particular moment is to make the accident happen. You feel it was the director who wasn’t attending properly to what was going on before his eyes. In the climax to the film, Will goes to court to tell untruths that are the saving of Miro, and Liv willingly backs up her husband’s fabrications. This doing a good deed through telling a lie has no moral or emotional weight. The sequence might be serviceable in a crime caper comedy – given what’s at stake for all concerned here, it comes across as merely ludicrous. There’s no spark in the relationship of Will and Liv so the apparent reconciliation which eventually takes place is dispiriting – you assume (but feel you’re not supposed to assume) that their life together will continue as unresolved and as fractious as before.
Juliette Binoche gives Amira a quiet alertness and a weary gallantry that are very convincing. The teenagers are played well enough by Rafi Gavron (Miro) and Poppy Rogers (Bea). Otherwise, the film is worse than it might be because of the casting. Jude Law became to Minghella what Leonardo DiCaprio has become to Scorsese. Law is far from a bad actor (of course he’s much better than DiCaprio and he was excellent in Ripley) but he hasn’t the substance to make anything of the character of Will. He’s fine at getting across the brittleness of the man’s life but we’re clearly supposed to see Will probing this and maturing emotionally, and Law stays shallow. Apart from his early encounters with Binoche, I thought his best scene here was when Will and Liv go to a relationship counsellor, where his continuing interruptions amusingly expose her humourlessness. Robin Wright Penn is very beautiful as Liv but she has a waxen quality that shuts out the audience as much as it does Will. Martin Freeman (Sandy) is wryly likeable but you wish Freeman could be something other than wryly likeable. He’s even more lightweight than Law: there are moments when they seem like a comedy duo with no jokes to work with. Vera Farmiga plays Oana with some panache although the character is too obviously written. The same goes for Ray Winstone’s CID man, who investigates the break-ins. Juliet Stevenson, another Minghella muse, is the relationship counsellor: it’s a cameo but, as usual, Stevenson tries to dominate proceedings and succeeds in the wrong way.
14 January 2010
