WhatzUp

Breaking and Entering
by Derek Neff

In the wake of a series of late-night break-ins at their brand new architecture firm, partners Will and Sandy begin to form different ideas of how to deal with the thieves. The new office is located in a poverty-stricken, high-crime section of London called King's Cross, and Will (Jude Law) begins a nightly surveillance of the building from his Land Rover parked nearby. Sandy (Martin Freeman, from the BBC version of "The Office"), on the other hand, just wants the cops to find and imprison the bad guys so he can get on with his life. (He has a crush on one of the women on the cleaning crew and is afraid that she will get blamed for the break-ins if someone else isn't caught soon.)

This is not a whodunit. We know from the beginning who the real thieves are: teenager and Bosnian refugee Miro (Rafi Gavron), lithe as an acrobat, comes in through the skylights, disarms the security system and lets in a crew of professionals who then proceed to ransack the place. For payment he gets one of the laptops they stole, which happens to be Will's. Miro is instructed to wipe the hard-drive clean before selling it, but he can't resist looking at the pictures and home movies of Will with his family, and it is this, ultimately, that gets him into trouble.

Will's family life, meanwhile, is falling apart. His longtime live-in girlfriend Liv (Robin Wright Penn) is distancing herself from him, and Liv's 13-year old-daughter Bea (Poppy Rogers), whom Will loves and treats as his own, is exhibiting signs of autism, and Liv and Will can't agree on how to go about seeking help for her. During his late-night surveillance missions, Will befriends a Russian prostitute (Vera Farmiga, The Departed), with whom he shares the details of his life, though he always politely rebuffs her sexual offers.

One night Will catches Miro in the act of trying to break in to the office yet again. But after chasing Miro back to his run-down apartment, he doesn't have the heart to have the boy arrested. You see, he recognizes Miro and the boy's mother Amira (Juliette Binoche) from a recent pleasant encounter. Before long, he's involved in a passionate, confused affair with Amira.

Director Anthony Minghella (Cold Mountain, The Talented Mr. Ripley) may use some of the familiar elements of crime drama, but this is as far from a crime drama as you can get. It's instead a nuanced, fairly absorbing character-driven drama about the perils (internal and external) of modern life. Everyone here is an outsider in some way, and the movie's title has just as much to do with the ways in which we permit or prevent others from impinging on our private lives as it does with the nominal crime that sets the course of events into play.