Film Review: Breaking and Entering Gets Full Attention of Law

Jude Law is one of the busiest actors in films today, so his movies seem to whiz by like signs on a freeway. But one of his better efforts that should not be overlooked is the newly released Breaking and Entering, a moody work about social division, architecture, burglary and foxes.

Okay, not so much foxes as one lone fox slipping through the ultra urban district of King's Cross in London, producing a memorable nocturnal cinematic image in director Anthony Minghella's nuanced production. Jude Law portrays a landscape architect (there's a profession you don't see in movies very often) who has opened his ultra modern offices in the rather seedy heart of King's Cross. His goal is to change the neighborhood's profile as distinguished by recent immigrants, prostitutes, hoodlums and criminals, and gentrify through master planned architectural development. A grand and futuristic scale model of the envisioned community occupies a tabletop of the office like a shrine. His efforts may be either noble or euthenic, but they are repeatedly thwarted by burglaries. As soon as computers and electronics are delivered to the office, the local thieves break in and steal it all.

In a slick Power Point presentation given by this visionary architect, he says to potential clients, "How we behave is directly related to the space around us." This is the foundational idea of Breaking and Entering. The architect is plunged into the truth of his own sales pitch when he surprises the teenaged burglar one night and chases him back to the soul killing identical cement projects where he dwells. It is in direct contrast to the architect's glass and steel airy apartment.

The contrasts in space underscore the contrasts in relationships pursued by the architect. For ten years, he has been with a vulnerable but cold woman who won't commit to marriage with him, played with superb brittleness and subtle inflection by Robin Wright Penn. She is a fair haired Scandinavian and suffers from depression which even she acknowledges as stereotypically inevitable. She totes around a portable light box as an artificial sun to chase away the melancholy that is her cultural legacy. Her dinnerware is antiseptically white. On the opposite end of the spectrum is the young burglar's mother, played by the always engaging Juliette Binoche. She is a dark eyed, earthy Bosnian Muslim who fled the violence of Sarajevo with her son. She takes in sewing work and plays a decrepit keyboard silently, hearing the notes inside her head. Her dishes are blazing yellow.

The only attribute shared by the women is their devotion to their respective children, a daughter and a son who each are gifted with gymnastic abilities. Driving further the point that behavior is directly related to surrounding space, the athletics of the privileged young girl take her to expensive gymnasiums with professional coaches while the athletics of the immigrant young boy lead him to illegal entry of buildings. In all other aspects, the two women couldn't be more unalike, and the architect finds himself helplessly attracted to both.

Fed up with his need to always make things "tidy," the architect gives in to his wilder urges. Director Minghella symbolizes this with the aforementioned fox making his way through the nighttime streets of King's Cross. It puts the viewer in mind of Fellini's peacock in the piazza from Amarcord, symbolizing nobility. Here, the fox is instinct opposed to reason. With tidiness shucked, the architect finds himself in a complicated situated where it becomes morally correct to lie. Can that be?

In addition to the beautiful faces and solid performances of the three leading characters--Law, Wright Penn and Binoche--there are standout appearances by Rafi Gavron as the young burglar reaching for a better life and Martin Freeman as the architectural firm's partner who has a relatively small role, but some of the film's best lines. A real scene stealer is Ray Winstone as Bruno the investigator, a locally born flatfoot who wryly admires the ambitious architectural plan for King's Cross and has his own inherent sense of good design, as he apprehends delinquents on a Vespa.

Breaking and Entering is a thinking movie which leaves indelible images on the brain. Running time is 120 minutes.