(4 of 5)
From Out of Africa and Cry Freedom to The Constant Gardener and Catch a Fire, Hollywood has paraded its love for stories about Africa--as long as they're mostly about white people. The poignant suffering of the blacks is a backdrop to the play of Danny's mixed motives. And, honestly, that's enough, since DiCaprio, here as in The Departed, proves himself the most watchful and watchable actor of his age. Since his teens, he has known how to make moral dilemmas seem both profound and sexy, and at 32 he just keeps getting better.
MISS POTTER The movies are ever awash in cheap, uplifting sentiment, which is to the genteel audience what cheap, degrading violence is to adolescents: the turn-on that dares not speak its name. So it's somewhat grudgingly that we recommend Miss Potter.
It is the story of Beatrix Potter, she of Peter Rabbit and dozens of other much loved children's books. When we meet her, she is a superannuated virgin, living with her well-to-do parents, writing about her "friends," the woodland creatures. She claims to talk to them, which may account for some of the twitchiness that occasionally mars Renée Zellweger's performance in the title role. Potter, however, is made of willful stuff. She finds a publisher (Ewan McGregor) for her books, falls in love with him, achieves best-sellerdom and, in this telling of her life, status as a largely overlooked feminist icon and an early environmentalist.
Al Gore would love her. But, dammit, so do we. It's lovely to see her preserving her vision for her books against commercial compromise, even more warming to see her fight for love and for keeping her beloved Lake District landscape a green and pleasant place. The director, Chris Noonan, doesn't play to our sentiments, he just lets them naturally evolve--even the animation of a few of her drawings doesn't feel especially forced. The result is an honorable and curiously winning film. BREAKING AND ENTERING Anthony Minghella's basic filmmaking impulse is toward the romantic epic (The English Patient, Cold Mountain). He likes to do long, ultimately unhappy love stories set against agitated historical backgrounds that impinge on the fates of his lovers. Breaking and Entering, though set in contemporary London, is a film of that character.
A firm of landscape architects keeps being robbed by an acrobatic young man. Will (Jude Law), one of the practice's partners, traces him and enters into an affair with the boy's mother (Juliette Binoche), who's a widowed seamstress trying to put the miseries of her Bosnian past behind her. The affair is perhaps understandable because Will is unhappy at home. His partner Liv (Robin Wright Penn) has a near autistic daughter, whose care obsesses and distracts Liv. Eventually order and forgiveness are imposed on these troubled lives.
The film is handsomely mounted and well played (particularly by the always magical Binoche--such a wonderfully alert actress), but somehow it never draws one into its schemes. Possibly that's because Minghella (who also wrote the script) has too much on his mind--the costs of urban gentrification, the unhappinesses of émigré and bourgeois life. Minghella is a decent-minded filmmaker. And a liberal-minded one too. He wants his characters to emerge morally instructed and reasonably happy. But it's not a lofty goal, and this is a movie that plods while we keep hoping it will soar.