Delayed Reaction: Breathe In

Premise: A high school music teachers and his British foreign exchange student have an affair.

 

This movie is Drake Doremus' follow-up to Like Crazy. It's similar in a lot of ways. There's a lovely British girl played again by Felicity Jones who falls for a man on the other side of the Atlantic. It's about a doomed romance that probably shouldn't exist. The main difference is that Like Crazy had a clearer hook and an artificial complication: Jones and Anton Yelchin were separated by an Ocean and unable to be together. Meanwhile, Breathe In is a more familiar story of an older man looking to a too young girl to be his muse because of suburban malaise. It's American Beauty but less pretentious. I get that being bored by a happy life because you think about the more exciting things you could have done instead is a real thing. I'm just bored by it though, especially when it's played like a male fantasy. Guy Pearce plays a music teacher who is gifted this beautiful, barely of age young British woman who falls for him and shares his love of music. I guess I don't see the lesson to learn here. At least when something similar happens in Mr. Holland's Opus, it's after years of development of him as a man who always dreamed of bigger things. In this, Pearce just seems bored more than anything.

 

I question Doremus' conviction to telling this story too. He casts a 29-year-old Felicity Jones to play the part of a high schooler (a Senior, I hope). Sure, Jones looks young for her age, but there is a difference between casting young and casting to look young. Casting Jones in the role is a way to get the audience to not turn on Pearce. While they say she's in high school, we know she's older. And it's less visually off-putting to see a man in his early-40s seduced by a woman in her mid/late-20s. Had they actually cast Saoirse Ronan, Dakota Fanning, or Maia Mitchell in the role (all about 18/19 at the time) the age difference would've been much more striking, and it would've been harder to see Pearce as anything other than predatory. I get why Doremus wouldn't have wanted to cast like that. It would've reframed the entire story. However, if he has to pull casting tricks to tell his story, I wonder what the value of the story is in the first place.

 

Otherwise, I thought this was a perfectly fine bit of Sundance fare. It's got a group of Oscar nominees in Pearce, Jones, and Amy Ryan. Mackenzie Davis is there too (at 25, also not all that believable as a high schooler). Doremus is still great at shooting wordless emotions. Had I found a way to invest in the protagonist's situation at all, I could've liked the movie.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend