Breaking and Entering
Anthony Minghella
After swoonsome period dramas The English Patient and Cold Mountain, director Anthony Minghella turns his eye on human relationships in modern-day London.
A central idea in the film is that sometimes things need to be broken before they can be fixed. Mouthed by Will Francis (Jude Law), a landscape architect who has no idea what he wants, it merely sounds like a platitude.
The problem was that Law was convincing when he told his estranged partner Liv(Robin Wright Penn) that the distance between them was very great.
It was less believable when he had a change of heart after a dalliance-turned-sour with a Bosnian immigrant (Juliet Binoche), and decided that Liv was the love of his life after all.
For a movie about breaking and entering of the criminal and emotional varieties, the ending was just too neat and tidy. It seemed that just about everyone got what they wanted. But the idea of a victimless crime simply doesn't wash.
(ST)