Though it stars the skilled and charming Jude Law and comes from the filmmaker behind the acclaimed “Talented Mr. Ripley” and “The English Patient,” “Breaking and Entering” never steals much attention.
The mostly well-acted but dry drama of modern European angst tries to make a comment on love’s strong grip and London’s new melting pot. Instead, it’s an Old World wallow with a flagging pace, flat emotion and dubious meaning.
Director-writer Anthony Minghella tells the tale of the up-and-coming landscape architect Will (Jude Law). He moves his fancy offices to the changing London neighborhood of King’s Cross, where a seedy criminal element still has a hold.
After his company is burglarized not once but twice by a ring of Bosnian immigrant ruffians, Will conducts his own investigation to find out that the gang’s nimble second-story man is really just a kid (Rafi Gavron). He lives with his chronically depressed — but, of course, sensuous! — widowed mother Amira (played by the still luminous and elegant Juliette Binoche). An affair heats up between the lonely souls, but the desperate Amira ends up blackmailing the already attached Will in an attempt to keep himfrom pressing charges against her son.
Meanwhile, it’s no wonder that the male lead is looking elsewhere for some nookie, considering that he has his own chronically depressed woman, a Swede of Bergman-esque proportions, waiting for him at home. She is unconvincingly played by Robin Wright Penn, who flunks the Scandinavian accent and never seems appealing enough to ever have attracted Jude Law’s bright and handsome main character.
Adding to the film’s creditability problems, the movie’s finale would have you believe that infidelity can actually be the catalyst that improves a relationship. While that may be true on rare occasion in the real world, the scenario plays more like a delusional male fantasy despite a substantive attempt by Mr. Law.
The only thing that ends up “Breaking” here is a critic’s concentration as she tries to stay awake the whole way through this fiction of high-class marquee names but low-functioning results.
‘Breaking and Entering’
Starring: Jude Law, Juliette Binoche, Robin Wright Penn
Director: Anthony Minghella
Rated R sexuality and language
