The other day I watched Breaking and Entering, one of the last films that Anthony Minghella directed. It got pretty bad reviews among Netflix viewers but it sounded interesting, and I guess it was, but I’m not really sure whether I liked it or not.
It is fairly easy to see why movies that seem “interesting” while you’re watching them can trigger negative reactions with some viewers. I don’t think it’s only that such viewers dislike these kinds of films, and that they’re translating the thought “I don’t like this kind of movie” into the language “Nobody will like this kind of movie: it’s a bad movie.” Interesting means something most filmmakers don’t automatically do, and movies that try very hard to be interesting often fail. These readers are probably accurately picking up on things that promised something interesting and ultimately fell short, elements in the film that weren’t persuasive about the new information they tried to communicate.
Usually the main problem seems to be the dialogue. It’s stilted, or else it’s overly metaphorical. It has nothing to do with the plot. It may not make sense as normal, conversational human verbal behavior, or even as any recognizable form of in-group banter. At times the actors are very evidently uncomfortable with it. Occasionally you suspect that what you’re seeing is the least interesting parts of the script, and that what otherwise would have been significant scenes were relegated to the cutting room floor. Which does no good to a plot that may be teetering on the edge of coherence anyway.
But there’s no such thing as a perfect movie. It’s still not obvious why this problem generates more hostility than others might. I don’t know the answer.
Anyway, the plot is still there, but what is the story about, really? The main character is an English architect, played by Jude Law, still young but getting close to middle age, often enough tempted to stray from his beautiful wife but never yet having done so. He is very nearly the only thoroughly English character in the film. His wife is Swedish though her father was American and she attended college here. His partner (Jim from the English version of The Office) is apparently Jewish. Their subordinates are Asian (and only one, that I recall, is male). The criminal gang with which his apparently perfect life becomes tangled up is composed of refugees from Bosnia. The only other English character is the gruff but not uncompassionate police detective.
The Dickensian situation Law finds himself him in uncovers the reality of how the other half live. Or maybe opens a somewhat cold (typically English?) professional to the possibility of compassion. Or something.
In the dénouement, he saves a Bosnian teenager—who has twice burglarized his office—from the prison sentence that ought to be his fate. Instead, the boy gets to return to Sarajevo with his Muslim mother, and escapes the bad influence imposed by his father’s Serbian relatives. (Though his uncle runs a crime ring, his father had been a doctor and died because he stayed behind to care for victims of the war. His mother, now a very busy seamstress for rich people, used to play Bach on the piano before the smallness of her apartment required her to give it up. These are utterly gorgeous housing projects by American standards, incidentally.) To do this, he bravely announces, publicly, that he has had “an inappropriate relationship” with the boy’s mother. That part is true. He goes on, though, to fabricate an intimate and long-lived relationship with the pair of them, in which he had employed the mother for years, and (together with his partner, who’s inclined to be a bit more vindictive) had offered extensive career counseling to the son. Thus, he knows the boy ought not to get caught up in “the system,” that he ought to be let go, and given a second chance.
So this pure person saves two lives by telling a lie. But it’s strange how their lives are saved. The good Bosnians go back to Bosnia and get away from the privileged Brits who exploit them at low pay; the Muslims get away from the Serbs who tempt them into a life of crime. How is this so different from the ethnic cleansing that had them fleeing to London in the first place? (The violence is missing, of course, and that’s not nothing.)
And there is a shadow tale that’s the more traditional ending for an English story like this one. London, that most urban of cities, corrupts outsiders who aren’t prepared to deal with it safely. It seems Law is permitting a young man to live a more normal life—which he may be—and to finish school, and also rescuing a sensitive middle-class woman from life in a tiny mews apartment strewn with the suit jackets and party dresses of strangers. But distant as the Dalmatian coast of Bosnia may seem, it is not the bucolic English countryside, much less Eden. And the architect who plans to beautify dismal Kings Cross with greenery is a very good liar.
Is this coherent? I don’t know, but I felt I was missing something important by not being English. All of this occurred to me days after I’d watched the thing. Emotionally, at the end of the film, I felt the story was about this Englishman and his discovery that there is an other half out there at all. But, if so, so what? It’s a typical story of discovery, a typical plot for this quiet little kind of film. If that’s not enough, I do think it’s a failure of execution on the director’s part.
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