Breaking and Entering Doesn't Quite Measure Up

I recently saw an advance preview of Anthony Minghella's new film, Breaking and Entering (It will be released limited in December, with national release in January). Breaking and Entering was very well done certainly, and Breaking and Entering's themes are Minghella's usual in the sense that he uses landscape to frame stories about adult fidelity and infidelity.

Breaking and Entering left me in an odd place, however, and I will be curious to see how others react to it. Personally, I cannot figure out if I found Breaking and Entering's steadfastly enduring women, who beg and dissolve and persist, distasteful on some level because I have worked hard to eliminate these sorts of miseries from my own life or because in Breaking and Entering Minghella is arguing that these quandries and miseries are the human condition and without them we may perhaps not be human at all. If Minghella inteded to ask "what's the difference between freedom and damage?" with Breaking and Entering is unclear, and it's one of Breaking and Entering's significant problems.

Jude Law plays cowards like no one else and as pretty as he was young, now that he's starting to grow out of his angelic looks a bit it's becoming clear that Jude Law going to be a devastatingly attractive older man in a couple of decades. HIs performance is very solid but is hampered by a script that can't decide between naturalism and heightened reality.

Breaking and Entering deals very deftly with a number of subjects in quite subtle ways including the legacy of the Bosnian war.

The young actors in Breaking and Entering are amazing, as are several essentially irrelevant supporting performers (there's some really funny stuff involving a whore that manages to be consistently surprising).

For my fellow celiac readers, Breaking and Entering also has a gluten-free/autism scene (the character Jude Law plays has a stepdaughter on the autism spectrum).

Breaking and Entering is also a fairly sexual film with lots of Imperfect sexy bodies, but also lots of weird blurring in sex scenes and I found it impossible to ascertain if this was a stylistic choice on MInghella's part or ratings related choice.

Some of the dialogue is a bit heavy-handed and unfortunately lacks the poetry that made up for that in The English Patient.

Ultimately Breaking and Entering made me angry and sad, and as such I also wanted it to be a better film for eliciting such feelings. A couple hours later though, it's faded to nothing. I am unsure whether to recommend it or not.