What a wonderful film. The “strangers intersect” motif of Crash combined with the romantic entanglement musings of Closer, and the controlled randomness of Craig Thompson’s Blankets. Surely to be one of the best films of 2006.
Written and directed by Anthony Minghella (Cold Mountain, The Talented Mr. Ripley)
Running time: Two hours and one minute (not counting closing credits)
---CAST:
Jude Law as Will Francis
Robin Wright Penn as Liv Francis
Juliette Binoche as Amira
Rafi Gavron as Miro
Poppy Rogers as Bea Francis
It may have been telling that when I notified people on my MovieView email list that we were having three screenings this past week for three different movies that all featured big stars, that this one received the greatest amount of interest. Perhaps those who look at the cast list and involvement of Anthony Minghella know what they like, but having forgotten that he directed The Talented Mr. Ripley and not having seen Cold Mountain, I asked for one of the pass-out seats in the auditorium, mostly out of a sense of merely following my respondents’ noses. To underscore just how engrossing this film is, I almost forgot to go into the lobby to pick up the assigned pack of questionnaires that I was designated to pass out that the end of the movie. It’s that good.
In this British drama, Jude Law plays Will Francis, an architect with a large studio office in a bad part of town, and a faltering relationship to Liv (Forrest Gump’s Robin Wright Penn) and his daughter Bea, an adorable girl but eccentric girl with a talent for gymnastics and a condition that appears to be mild autism or Asperger’s Syndrome, or perhaps OCD. At least I think she’s his daughter. He refers to her as such at times, but at others, his wife tells him that she is not. Whether this is an indication of her being his stepdaughter, or a deeper sign of Will and Liv’s troubled marriage, and if it is difficult to determine, I think Minghella may want it that way.
When Will’s studio experiences a series of rooftop break-ins resulting in the theft of some important materials, Will decides to stakeout his office to find out who is committing them, and discovers that the culprit is Miro, a nimble immigrant teen from Bosnia, who despite his intelligence and limberness, wants nothing to do with school or a legitimate life, preferring instead to carry out jobs for his uncle. This causes no end of heartache to his hard-working seamstress mother, who is appalled that Miro is throwing away what Miro’s father sacrificed his life for. Miro, for his part, barely remembers his father, and resents the idea of slaving away like his mother for what he wants, even if it means repeated trips to social worker who warns him that he’s on his way to a life of prison.
When Will follows Miro home, he realizes that he and his mother, Amira, are the same people he and his daughter met at a gymnasium, but rather than turning Miro in, he becomes entangled in Amira’s life. You might think from this that you know what happens next, and you may be partially right, but you might also be thrown off by what actually happens. Some movies have plot twists. This one has Möbius strips. Plot threads that in the hands of the cliché-driven, may have been utterly predictable, here sometimes lead off in completely unexpected directions, or even back onto themselves. This may irritate some who see these are red herrings that go nowhere, but in my mind, they resembled the sometimes fractured, imperfect contingencies of intertwined lives. Imbued with a sense of randomness, perhaps. Not leading to an intuitive conclusion, maybe. But meaningless? No. They signify the sometimes unpredictable nature of relationships that may defy logic, but ring true. You might think, for example, that when a character comes home smelling like the perfume of the pushy hooker who insists on staying in his car because it’s warm, that you know that his wife will leave him or divorce him, and not that the husband will simply give the hooker a bottle of the same perfume his wife wears in order to avoid having to ask one of the few people he gets to open up to to leave, much less what the reaction will be on the part of someone else who discovers an artifact left in the car by the hooker.
The relationships are not linear, but overlapped. Will enjoys an improved relationship with one character, but does not necessarily decide to terminate the old one. When one character prepares to blackmail another, your heart sinks as you realize the outcome, but are surprised at what really happens. Minghella even manages to take one of the most clichéd settings for a movie’s climax, and manages to twist it so that it instead reveals characters, instead of simply tidying things up because the movie’s over.
My coworker Nick told me he thought the movie was slow, and didn’t care much for the dialogue. Me, I was entranced. I wanted to find out what would happen next with these people, as if they were real.
It is currently scheduled for August 2006 release, and I highly recommend it.
For production photos from this film, go here.
your review delighted me. i am such an avid admirer of the multi talented jude law and anthony minghella. they have done remarkable work together in the past and this just solidifies my opinions. sometimes i think jude is not given enough credit for his acting prowess because his beauty gets in the way. i'm hoping that since it's been a year and a half since he graced the big screen this film will catapult him back in the big leagues where he belongs.
Thank you, Dolores. But you don't think he's already in the "big leagues"?