"Knight Thoughts" -- exclusive web content
Jude Law and Juliette Binoche find love in unexpected places
The Walking Wounded:
Breaking and Entering
2-9-07 "Knight Thoughts" web exclusive
By Richard Knight, Jr.
Anthony Minghella writes and directs movies for people who read books.  Not just any books, but the kind that can transport readers
away from the humdrum – those spellbinding novels that makes one sigh with fond remembrance when the title is mentioned by a
friend.  Minghella’s movies often have that same effect on people and he always wins an extra two points with me because his
pictures are so against the grain of other Hollywood big budget, all star movies.

But Minghella’s slow, methodical pictures aren’t for everyone.  It seems to be a matter of taste with his movies.  I thought both
The
English Patient
and Cold Mountain when stripped of their luxurious settings, not much more than highfalutin nonsense but I have
friends – mostly women friends I admit – who swoon when those movies are talked about.  And I certainly appreciate the grand
technique on display in these sprawling, old fashioned “epic romances.”  And Minghella, as a musician, always seems to have a pitch
perfect sense of rhythm going in his scenes.  They are masterful in their precision.

Just such a picture is his latest,
Breaking and Entering.  It’s the first picture in which Minghella has combined the lush romantic
fervor with what I’ve liked in many of his other pictures – the coldly calculated, terribly literate and emotionally sophisticated
Minghella of
Truly, Madly Deeply and especially The Talented Mr. Ripley (which featured one of the most haunting theme songs ever –
should have taken the Oscar).

Jude Law who gave Minghella his best screen performance to date in
Ripley now gives him another one as the central figure in
Breaking and Entering.  He plays Will Francis, a landscape architect, who along with his business partner relocates his offices to
London's crime infested King’s Cross neighborhood.  The neighborhood is in the process of being gentrified – a task that Will’s firm
is overseeing – but in the meantime the offices are repeatedly broken into by a young Slavic teenager, Miro (Rafi Gavron) who’s
working for a gang of thieves.  In the meantime, Will’s long term relationship with his girlfriend (Robin Wright Penn), a manic
depressive with possibly an autistic daughter, is spiraling out of control.  The break-ins, naturally, are metaphors for what's going on
in the lives of all the characters.

Miro’s mother Amira (Juliette Binoche) has no idea what he’s up to until the plot takes several twists and turns that bring she and
Will together.  In Amira, Will seems to at last have found a lover that he can give his heart to with no strings attached.  But as in all
Minghella’s dramas, love is extremely complicated by the intercession of life and none of the principals will escape unscathed.

The movie has many dramatic shifts (some quite unbelievable – especially the interlude with Vera Farmiga as a Slavic prostitute) but
in Minghella’s capable hands, the emotional complexities are beautifully handled.  This is a delicately balanced little movie,
beautifully acted by its leads and supporting cast.  The complexity of the characters’ emotions and their subsequent choices, I’m
afraid, may make this a little too heavy going for those expecting the broad stroked Minghella of
English Patient and Cold Mountain.  
The film is scaled much smaller than that – it’s quietly successful and has a cumulative effect that is very powerful.  And fans of
Ripley and Truly, Madly will revel in the film’s heartbreaking, true to life choices thrust upon the characters at the exact moment that
happiness seems in their grasp.