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| February 1st, 2007 |
The new movie season is off to a stumble and a mumble. With Anthony Minghella (The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Cold Mountain all starring Jude Law) writing his own script as well as directing Jude Law again, with Juliette Binoche and Robin Wright Penn, I expected more from Breaking and Entering than a dull and dreary snooze. It premiered last September in Toronto to sluggish reviews, then opened briefly in December in Los Angeles to qualify for Oscars, and is finally arriving commercially. What a disappointment. After 10 years, the eroding relationship between an unmarried London architect (Jude Law), his Swedish girlfriend (Robin Wright Penn), and their anorexic daughter obsessed with ballet and acrobatics finally implodes when he falls in love with a Bosnian refugee (Juliette Binoche) whose teenage son breaks into his office and steals his computer. For a film about urban angst and adultery, it s more dysfunctional than both its plot and characters, stretching patience and credibility to the max.
Envisioning London as the nadir of multicultural mayhem that is overwhelming the atlas faster than global warming, Mr. Minghella deposits proud and decent people in the dangerous neighborhood of Kings Cross where Mr. Law struggles to rebuild the city slums with daring new architecture that enrages traditionalists (think of the ugly new Pompidou Center in Paris) and targets its inhabitants for a series of burglaries. Spending his nights slouched in his Land Rover staring at his warehouse seems preferable to sitting at home with his depressed Swedish partner and their autistic daughter. When the teenage thief turns up, he tracks him down to a council flat near Camden, where the boy s exotic mother persuades him not to call the police. When he discovers his laptop inside her flat and finds his first flash of happiness in years inside her bed, a brief encounter leads to an affair fraught with lies and deceptions. Describing the collapsing moral centers of their lives, the characters keep using the word complicated. It s a word that fits the movie, too. The dilemmas faced by everyone are well drawn, but the humanity with which Mr. Law and his partner save the vulnerable Bosnian immigrants from deportation is not entirely credible. The woman from Sarajevo struggling to stay alive as a seamstress and save her son from a life of crime in a seedy, hopeless environment is the emotional center of the film, and Ms. Binoche is touching and effective. Less believable is the anemic home life between Mr. Law and Ms. Wright Penn, whose frigidity is passed off as one of those Swedish things, but which fails to work in English, let alone Swedish. The bizarre behavior of their daughter, who performs gymnastics day and night and screams hysterically at all hours, is an annoying distraction. So is the intrusion of Vera Farmiga (from Martin Scorsese s The Departed) who keeps popping up as a flamboyant hooker from Eastern Europe who turns tricks in Mr. Law s Range Rover. I was more impressed with the way the director uses the change from ruin to revitalization in both architecture and human contact as metaphors for globalization. But in the end, nothing in Breaking and Entering makes much of an impact. Like the decaying London sprawl it depicts, the film is also a damaged blight ready for the wrecking ball.
Seraphim Falls is an old-fashioned western, epic in visual grandeur but unfortunately myopic in scope and dialogue, set in the aftermath of the Civil War, with Pierce Brosnan and Liam Neeson giving the old saddlesore revenge theme all they ve got, and then some. The two real stars are Conrad Buff, the gifted editor who won an Academy Award for Titanic, and two-time Academy Award-winning cinematographer John Toll (Braveheart, Legends of the Fall ), who captures a full range of poetic resonance in the landscapes of snowy Rockies and parched deserts, lending the film as austere and beautiful a portrait of the American West as one could hope to find. Nothing else in the film quite matches the camerawork, or the savage beauty that is as penetrating as the brutal action sequences.
Five years after Lincoln won his struggle for the abolition of slavery, a lone figure gaunt and thorny as mesquite sits before a fire in the snowy mountain peaks. He is Gideon (Pierce Brosnan), a bearded figure cloaked in fur, lost in thought, until he is pitched from his reverie by the echo of a rifle and the whiz of a bullet that cracks his shoulder blade. Leaving everything he owns behind, Gideon runs for cover in a nearby forest of fir trees, leaving a trail of blood in the snow. So begins the breathless opening act of Seraphim Falls, which also turns out to be the third act of a grim cycle of rage and revenge orchestrated by Colonel Morsman Carver (Liam Neeson), who for reasons that are not immediately clear, has devoted his live to hunting and tracking his prey in a plot that can only end in murder. He s even hired a posse of outlaw trackers to help him. So Gideon crawls away, bleeding profusely, taking brief respite on a river bank to remove the bullet from his arm, cauterize the wound, and continue down the valley. The chase begins.
The events leading up to this showdown are slowly revealed as the body count mounts. Along the journey we encounter rapacious traders, vicious railway foremen, and suspiciously over-friendly Christian missionaries, but the focus remains centered on the hunter and the hunted until they end up in the punishing desert with nature unleashed in its harshest elements. By the time the two men meet face to face the film has moved from the order of civilized society to the raw and lawless wilderness. The emotional conclusion comes only after a violent climax in which both men find the mysteries hidden in the darkest shadows of their souls. This debut feature by TV director David Von Ancken, who also wrote the script (with Abby Everett Jacques) is full of awesome locations in Oregon and New Mexico so rugged you think you are looking at a primal John Ford western, but the draggy pursuit at the center of the plot is more like Les Miserables with cactus. The guys are charismatic even when they re encrusted with mud and dried plasma, but the writing is too sparse to give them much dramatic force as fully developed characters. After 115 minutes of tedium, when the door to the mystery of their blood feud is finally unlocked by a pistol-packing Mama in a red dress Anjelica Huston, of all people you might just as well wish she had thrown way the key. The technical revels are arresting, but Seraphim Falls is slow of motive and thin of plot a movie that dies with its boots on.
Catch and Release is notable for one thing: it marks the directorial debut of Susannah Grant, the sensitive and thoughtful writer responsible for Erin Brokovich, the excellent and underrated, In Her Shoes, and the recent adaptation of Charlotte s Web. Otherwise, it s a romantic comedy that is neither blisteringly bad nor truly memorable, oddly out of touch with modern feminism, and a big waste of Jennifer Garner. The awkwardly conceived plot revolves around a couple named Gray and Grady. Who would name the two main characters of a film Gray and Grady? Time for a rewrite before the movie begins. But Grady dies in a bachelor party canoe trip before it even begins, leaving his fiancee Gray (Ms. Garner, lovely but understandably blank) to move in with Grady s roommates, Dennis (Sam Jaeger), who runs a fisherman s supply store, and tough, fat, hairy Gummy Bear Sam (played by director Kevin Smith), whose job is writing quotations for Celestial Tea. They all live in Boulder, Colorado, where at least 90 percent of the citizens seem zombified by happiness pills, and there s a lot of great fly-fishing. Contrived from start to finish, the movie proceeds to involve Gray with a third friend named Fritz (Timothy Olyphant), an obnoxious but absurdly camera-ready babe magnet and wannabe film director who hangs around after the funeral. There is no logical reason for Fritz to remain in the script for more than 10 minutes of graveside goodbyes, but for plot purposes he s an important link to some secrets his late friend Grady kept from Gray, including the fact that he stashed away a million dollars and had an affair with another woman on the side (Juliette Lewis), with whom he fathered a child. Among an abundance of less than convincing mourning, a few tender revelations, and too much comic banter, you can see the romance between the bereaved Gray and the horny Fritz coming a mile away. The acting is painfully broad, the family of grieving misfits more than just a little bit preposterous, and in a role that looks like it was created for and rejected by Julia Roberts, a lot of Jennifer Garner s usual contrived sparkle goes down the drain fast. (Stranger, still, is the unflattering camerawork that cruelly emphasizes her worst angles inexplicably.) The versatile and appealing Mr. Olyphant deserves a good romantic comedy as an antidote to his grubby appearance in TV s Deadwood series, but I wouldn t call this one breakout material. The pudgy, hirsute Mr. Smith works hard to emulate Jack Black, but isn t one Jack Black already more than enough? The title Catch and Release has something to do with fly-fishing, but this is one romcom that cuts bait and disappears hook, line and sinker.