Mark Reviews Movies: BREAKING

Breaking, Bleecker Street

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 25, 2022

The intentions of Breaking, which dramatizes the final part of the real-life story of a military veteran whose life is undone by a bureaucratic clerical error, are good. This story deserves and needs to be told, not only because of the specifics of this man's circumstances, but also because of how those particulars point to a greater and constant failure of various systems meant to aid veterans.

The central question, though, is whether or not exclusively telling this chapter in the life of Brian Brown-Easley is the right way to go about making those points. In focusing on this particular day of Brown-Easley's life, the screenplay, written by director Abi Damaris Corbin and Kwame Kwei-Armah, ultimately becomes more about the processes and procedures of a stand-off than it does about the man, his broader experiences, and the issues—both personal and systemic—that brought him to this desperate situation.

John Boyega plays Brian, whom we first meet being forcibly removed from a Veterans Affair office in handcuffs. He's a Marine vet, currently working two jobs, living out of a motel, running low on credit for his cellphone, and behind on multiple bills. The man just wants the money that's owed to him by the VA for his disability payments from an unspecified injury sustained while serving in Iraq. As we soon learn, though, the check was diverted to a local community college as payment on a debt—a debt that Brian insists he already paid.

On the night before he sets out on a last-chance plan to get the VA to pay and for the world to hear his story, Brian calls his young daughter Kiah (London Covington), who's living with his ex-wife Cassandra (Olivia Washington), to tell her he won't be able to see her the next day. Then, he starts building something out of circuit boards and wires. When he walks into the local branch of a major bank in Atlanta, Brian takes out some money and hands the teller a note. It says that he has a bomb.

The build-up to this event, which makes up the rest of Corbin and Kwei-Armah's story, shows a considerable amount of care and compassion for Brian's plight. Indeed, the movie maintains that perspective, even as it starts expanding the narrative's scope to include more characters, more issues, and attention toward the systems of law enforcement that gather and plan to stop Brian before he can detonate the bomb.

Part of our continued sympathy for the character comes from the gradual revelation of additional details about how he ended up in such a mindset (The screenplay and the central performance suggest that Brian's health issues are mental as well as physical before this hostage situation, although that remains a suggestion). The rest of it comes from Boyega's tight-rope performance, which veers between rage-filled paranoia, complete dejection, and moments of genuine consideration for the two women he has taken hostage.

They are Estel (Nicole Beharie, great in a lived-in performance), the head manager of the bank, and Rosa (Selenis Leyva), the assistant manager who receives Brian's note. He treats them politely and offers continual apologies, and in a moment of sudden fear, Brian reflexively jumps on top of Rosa to protect her from a perceived threat.

For a while, this dichotomy of narrative, in which the standoff is both a source of tension and a way of revealing information about Brian's past, works toward revealing matters of character, while also arguing that an avoidable injustice has been performed by a system that doesn't care (In a flashback, a VA rep hands Brian a pamphlet about homelessness when he says he close to that, and the implications of how severe that issue is for such a thing to be printed en masse are quietly, subtly heartbreaking). Eventually, though, the movie takes on additional perspectives and concerns, and they ultimately begin to overshadow Brian, the extent of his experience and problems, and the straightforward efficacy of the central message.

Basically, the supporting cast—from those two bank employees, to a local news producer (played by Connie Britton) who wonders how to present his story without exploiting him or getting in the way of the police operation, to the various law enforcement agents, including chief negotiator Eli Bernard (the late Michael Kenneth Williams, who's a commanding and thoughtful presence here)—become as dominant as Brian within the story. The plot itself, which has kept to Brian's point of view in an attempt to understand him and how he got here, also shifts. The bank workers plan to escape while Brian is distracted. Various local, state, and federal agencies jockey for control and, later, against culpability, and as Eli tries to bring the situation to a peaceful resolution, his commanding officer (played by Jeffrey Donovan) clearly has a different goal in mind.

Breaking essentially transforms from a character study and piece of message-making, which happens to revolve around a standoff, into a story about that standoff, which just happens to have a message. That's unfortunate, because the man and that message are more important than how they're ultimately framed here.

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