Breaking (2022)
John Boyega, portraying a man pushed to the edge, takes full flight as an actor.
John Boyega is gripping as the troubled Brian Brown-Easley in Breaking
Breaking (2022)
I first saw John Boyega in the superb Small Axe (2020), a series of five dramas exploring London’s West Indian community from the ’60s through the early ’80s (available now on Amazon Prime Video).
That anthology’s director, Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave), was so stylistically adept he could range from rousing social protest (Mangrove) to hallucinatory riffs on West Indian dance rhythms (Lovers Rock).
Boyega starred in Small Axe’s third episode, Red, White and Blue, its title a mocking commentary on the vaunted British national unity embodied in The Union Jack. Boyega played Leroy Logan, a London police officer who was one of the first Blacks to rise in the department’s ranks.
His white confreres tried to stifle his every advance, and as I watched Boyega’s steely, unyielding performance I thought, This guy can hold a whole movie together.
I felt wholly vindicated watching Boyega’s compelling new movie Breaking. The writer-director Abi Damaris Corbin builds on the true story of Brian Brown-Easley, a Marine veteran who fought in Iraq.
Back home, Brian can’t get the Veterans Administration to return to him the grand sum of $892 he’s owed. When we meet him, he’s fallen on hard times.
He has good relations with his ex-wife and especially his daughter. But for reasons he can’t explain, he hasn’t landed on his feet, held down a job, been the father he wanted to be. He’s mostly been beaten down by disillusionment.
He’s slow to anger, can fall to weeping, or abruptly fly into rage. We can soon imagine that Brian was a psychologically frail man before he went into the Marines. His military service, far from toughening him, distanced him from the country he imagined he was defending. By contrast, in Britain, the indomitable Logan refused to let his country underestimate him.
Which means that here Boyega has an entirely different acting challenge, namely, to show us the slow dissolution of a man his country has bureaucratically belittled, dismissing him as too powerless to respect.
We see just how estranged Brian is from the U.S. on a day he gets into a violent scuffle at a VA office. A chilly clerk, bluntly informing him that he’s entitled to even less money than he’d hoped, smugly hands him a pamphlet on homelessness.
When he explodes, he’s wrestled to the floor and briefly jailed. After he’s released, with his money running low, that $892 looks like a lifeline. He needs it now. What will it take to get the VA to cough it up?
Desperate, he reconnoiters a Marietta, Georgia branch of Wells Fargo and decides, on what almost seems like a whim, to enter the bank, threaten to explode a bomb in his backpack, and declare he’ll hold the staff hostage until his demand is met.
But this is no Dog Day Afternoon (1975). In that movie, Al Pacino's Sonny Wortzik demanded a large sum, plus a sex change operation for his partner, and as his clash with authorities escalated, he tied himself to social unrest with his cries of Attica!
Brian can’t even begin to think that grandiosely. He has no allies. A simple cash payment from the VA is all he’s demanding. And the script makes sure we see him as an ordinary person who’s in way over his head.
But this is just where the movie, trying to draw us closer to him, falters. We quickly fear that he’s a threat more to himself than anyone else. He releases most bank employees and patrons, holding on to the two who can be of most help to him in his standoff with police and media. One is Estel Valerie (Nicole Beharie), the manager; the other is her assistant, Rosa Diaz (Selenis Leyva).
Both women sense they have more than a hothead on their hands. This man has a grievance, and he won’t free them until his demand is met. And his pledge to blow up the bank stands. So, their empathy for him, arbitrarily dropped into the script, seems to come from nowhere. We can’t quite share it.
Massive official fire power begins to coalesce, from local police to the FBI. Snipers await orders to take the one good shot they believe they can make. The SWAT team leader Major Riddick (Jeffrey Donovan) is ready, indeed eager, to give that order.
But another officer, Eli Bernard (the late Michael K. Williams, who was Omar on The Wire), thinks this heavy-handed amassing of guns is all wrong. Getting Brian on the phone, he’s able to win his trust as a Black fellow former Marine who’s had his own difficulties with the VA.
Michael K. Williams as a police officer working against time in Breaking
As the standoff wears on, paradoxically, our sympathy for Brian begins to leak away. Boyega does brilliant, surprising acting turns by screaming demands one moment, then, suddenly, whimpering in dismay at what he’s letting himself do. He repeatedly apologizes to his two terrified hostages. He’s at his most tender and earnest when talking on the phone to his daughter.
And he assures Eli that he only wants his money, and a chance to live in peace. When Estel says she’ll give Brian the money out of Wells Fargo’s holdings, he flatly refuses. “I don’t want the bank’s money,” he repeats. He demands satisfaction from the VA itself.
This frustration with unresponsive institutions is an easily understood trigger, and Brian’s impatience, though obviously out of proportion, never seems silly or unjustified. It’s his country, we’re asked to believe, that’s being unfair to him, and that’s what he wants everyone to know.
But he’s being spectacularly unfair to himself, and the script never explains why. This disconnect is amplified by the scale of the tanks, weaponry and manpower on display, along with live TV coverage.
It doesn’t evenly match the threat Brian is posing, nor does it seem to be a shrewdly devised tactic. It feels like more of a show of force to impress us in the audience, and as such it backfires: it’s so big, we can’t calibrate exactly how deeply it’s frightening Brian.
Beharie and Leyva as the two hostages give nicely modulated performances. We see their fear escalate, but as we watch we also see them realize that while they can plead with Brian, they can’t persuade him to surrender. He’ll give in when his mission is accomplished, and none of those negotiating with him can be sure that $892 is the actual price of release.
Of course, it’s what that small sum has grown to mean that’s being dramatized here. But, commanding as Boyega is, we need more of Brian’s back story to understand why he chose this desperate act.
We don’t see enough of what pushed him over the edge. Or, just as importantly, what might have held him back. The right job to tide him over? Help from a friend? His ex-wife's understanding, and his daughter's devotion, obviously haven't been enough to keep him from taking this all but futile risk.
As acutely as we feel Brian’s fall, not enough is revealed onscreen for us to want to reach into the movie and pull him back, urge him to join us imperfect creatures out here who might be able to grasp what he’s going through.
Technically, the movie is trim and accomplished. But those skills aren’t what pull us through this slightly underwritten yet involving story.
It’s Boyega. Somehow, even without a thoroughly realized character to play, the actor keeps us guessing about what’s turned Brian into this ticking bomb. We never stop wondering what would actually ease his pain. Boyega convinces us that we’re seeing a man willing to take a possibly fatal step, without realizing that he may already have fallen off it.