A free-association movie. Writer-director Anthony Minghella, scaling back after Cold Mountain, starts in one place, leaps to another and then winds up somewhere so surprising even he couldn’t have been sure of where he was headed. Whether all of this makes for a good movie is another matter. Minghella certainly captivates us at the start, as he introduces an architect (Jude Law) struggling to make a relationship work with a distant woman (Robin Wright Penn) who has an autistic daughter. An additional host of class issues arise when the architect’s new office, built in London’s seedy King’s Cross neighborhood, gets broken into. He tracks down the young thief, an immigrant from Sarajevo, which eventually leads him into the arms of the thief’s mother (Juliette Binoche). As you can see, there is a lot you just have to go with here; Breaking and Entering only works if you’re willing to play along. Such waywardness may not make for the tightest of narratives, but it certainly gives the movie the pulse of real, random life.
