Jude Law is Back on Track

Breaking And Entering, written by the director, is a gritty affair, set in contemporary north London and tackling obviously Zeitgeist-y themes of identity, immigration, and the pressures of life in an imperfect multicultural society. Law plays Will, the architect as solipsist, an urbane fox in a selection of muted collarless shirts who is working hard on the redevelopment of King’s Cross and not hard enough on his failing marriage to Liv (Robin Wright Penn), whose teenage daughter is an autistic fidget and whose other close family members have all died. Cheery, huh?

When Will’s swanky new offices are burgled by Miro, a teenage tearaway who makes off with his laptop, he’s drawn into a parallel, twilight capital inhabited by Balkan gangsters, immigrant prostitutes and a beautiful seamstress, played by Juliette Binoche, with whom he becomes romantically involved.

It’s possible to see the film as a Londoner’s companion piece to Michael Haneke’s brilliant Parisian thriller, Hidden, which caused a stir at the beginning of this year, with its privileged yuppies, its disaffected immigrants and its sense that nothing, in the city, is not being watched. Tentative at first, the film becomes increasingly convincing even if, unlike in Haneke’s movie, the resolution is a trifle too redemptive, especially for the self-regarding phiJanderer in the smart suit.

We make our beds, Minghella’s film seems to say, and then we must lie in them (in one scene, before Law and Binoche have sex for the first time, they carefully place clean sheets on the bed they are shortly to dirty), but u1timately, if we confront our crimes and are contrite enough, perhaps we can undo some of our damage.

“I need to tell you what I’ve done,” says Law’s character to his wife, and it is definitely his need, his vanity, that compels his confession.

No doubt it’s reductive - and overly convenient for my purposes - but it’s hard not to draw parallels between Will and Jude, Anthony Minghella’s admonishments notwithstanding. Law looks pretty uncomfortable when I bring this up, but he concedes that “there were things there I could recognize,”

So does Law think Will deserves his redemption for admitting to his affair? He pauses for a while. “Yeah,” he says. “Will is trying to do the right thing. Finally he has to do something uncomfortable, and he has to hold his hands up and say, ‘I’ve been an idiot.’ And he apologizes. And through doing that he also probably makes himself a happier individual.”

And so we forgive him?

“Some probably won’t. But I think that’s a harsh decision. There was obviously something not right in him. No one else is to blame, but he had to go out and break those windows. And then when it came down to it he therefore had to hold his hands up and say, ‘Yeah, I broke those windows.’ He acknowledged his role in it and tried to do the right thing. And eventually he did.”

That must be something that strikes a chord with Law, because to continue the metaphor, he broke some windows himself, in his own life?

“Yeah.”

Has he forgiven himself?

“Erm… I don’t know whether it’s about forgiving yourself. Yes.”

And has he achieved redemption?

“Things happen,” he says. “It goes back to hurting people. You can’t spend your life apologizing. You can hold your hands up and say, ‘I ****ed up.’ You can do everything in your power to make that pain better. But what kind of a person would you be to then spend the rest of your life torturing yourself? In a way your responsibility in ****ing up is to show that you’ve learned from it and that you admitted to it and hopefully then move forward and not do it again… I suppose if there’s a message in this film it’s that you’ve got to be responsible for your actions and try and rectify things that go wrong if you can.”

He looks pretty pained at this point, and then he wants to add something, and I promise to include it in this article. “It’s really hard talking about this,” he says, “because any time I’m referring to the film it sounds like I’m referring to myself and of course there are parallels but I’ve got to distinguish the two, and I am talking about the film.

But it is also true to say that Will’s relationship with Liv is not complete… That’s not to say that the pain inflicted on Liv because of his affair is right, but there’s no smoke without fire. So, perhaps pain, perhaps hurt, is part of the process we all have to go through in order to find peace of mind. Breaking windows is a metaphor for that. It’s a really good metaphor.”

Before Christmas, we’ll be able to see Law at the cinema again, in a film called The Holiday. This is, apparently, an unapologetically mainstream Hollywood romantic comedy co-starring Cameron Diaz, Kate Winslet and Jack Black.

You’ll be as relieved as Law was to know that I haven’t seen it yet and don’t propose to draw any parallels whatsoever between his character, an unassuming Brit called Graham, and himself. Although if I may say so - and I have seen the trailer - he and Diaz do make a rather handsome couple.

Just kidding.

Jude Law has been acting since he was a child. He says he “understood the language” of performance from the age of five or six. “Acting,” he says, “was something that I was just able to do and felt confident and very happy doing.”

I suggest to him that perhaps one of the reasons people seemed so down on him after Alfie and the disappointments of 2004 was that after Ripley he’d been expected to become a huge A-list movie star when, in fact, that was never his intention. He is, at least in some sense, a character actor in the body of a leading man.

He agrees, with reservations. ”I’m not a star like Tom Cruise,” he says. “Very few British actors are.

“There’s a period,” he says, remembering the transition from plain actor to major star, “when it’s all starting and you feel absolutely in control. You think, ‘I’m getting work, being paid and people are recognizing me and it looks like I’m going to get more work…’ Then suddenly the way people see you becomes like they’re seeing a product, a separate entity and your name is… a brand. That’s when you lose control.”

There are upsides to this, he says, in that increased celebrity means offers of better, bigger roles, as well as more money and a wider audience. But, he says, “if you look at the body of work I’ve done it’s pretty obvious I’m not going to make a Mission: Impossible”.

As if to confirm this, Law’s next project after My Blueberry Nights will be a remake of Sleuth, the twisty, elaborate 1972 two-hander starring Michael Caine and Laurence Olivier. Produced by Law and Ben Jackson, this will be a contemporary update, with Kenneth Branagh directing from a new script by Harold Pinter, Law taking the Caine role and Caine himself taking the Olivier part. By the time you read this, early rehearsals may well be underway and the film-makers are hoping to begin shooting in January at Twickenham Studios, in southwest London.

No disrespect to Tom Cruise or his Hollywood counterparts, but it’s difficult to imagine many of them undertaking a similarly iconoclastic project.

My last evening in New York, I meet Ben Jackson and his genial friend Nathan Bogle, another Brit, at our hotel’s rooftop bar. Law joins us fresh from the Dada exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, and quickly calls time on our conversation about fashion. “No one’s allowed to talk about shopping!” says the man in the skin-tight strides and the armless T-shirt. Five Coronas each later and we’re out on the street four Englishmen striding through the hot, thick soup of a summer night in search of adventure, or at least a little something to line our stomachs.

La Esquina is a trendy Mexican joint hidden beneath a giant neon sign reading CORNER. Here we’re led down a winding corridor, through a door marked “Employees Only” and via the kitchen to our table.

Beers appear, plus chicken quesadillas and a pitcher of frozen margarita that sets Law off on a reminiscence about after-school Slush Puppies and somehow he and I segue from that to the Zidane head-butt and now Jackson’s saying “Hi” to Hedi Slimane, the Dior Homme designer, who’s sitting across from us in his scarf and skinny jeans and that guy over there with the beard is Simon Hammerstein, as in the grandson of Rodgers and Hammerstein, and now Ben and I are out on the street hunting for cigarettes and talking to these girls who were sitting at the table next to us who are having a birthday party and want to know what we’re doing next and you’ll forgive, I hope, the spontaneous prose and the first names but the night’s gathering pace, achieving a momentum of it’s own, and now we’re walking to Simon’s new place on the Lower East Side and there’s a curly-haired English girl wearing black jodhpurs and snakeskin stilettos and she’s singing snatches of Adam and the Ants and telling Jude that, like, she’s from Lewisham too, and he’s smiling and walking faster and people whisper his name as he passes but by the time they’ve realised that yes it real1y is him he’s gone.

Simon’s place is this beautiful little half-finished cabaret theatre with builders’ debris everywhere and won’t it be fantastic when it opens and suddenly I’m upstairs holding a bottle of Patron tequila in one hand and a bottle of Veuve in the other and I’m chasing the first with the second and Jude’s drawing a circle on the wall with his finger to explain to me the real meaning of the world “sublime” and taking another Marlboro Light and then somehow we’re talking about Steve Guttenberg and Level 42 and oh, Jesus, that curly-haired girl’s getting more and more demented and now she sounds Australian and Simon’s stripped down to a pair of red satin shorts and we’re on the street again and someone wants a photo of Jude but he smiles them away and we’re on the move, heading to a bar called Purple.

In Purple it’s too loud and too hot so we drink a beer and jump a cab, me and Jude and Simon, and the cabbie’s telling us he doesn’t like drunks and I tell him I’m not drunk and Jude mumbles something about Travis Bickle and then we’re in his suite again and he’s ordering more booze and playing iPod DJ and some girls are dancing and I look at my watch and it’s quarter to four and Jude’s giving me a man-hug on his private terrace and the Cure are playing and Christ I’ve got to be at the airport in a few hours and, and, and…

And looking back now to that last proper conversation with Jude Law, I remember him bringing up something I’d said the day before, about him appearing to be golden, a chosen person, one of the lucky ones.

“It sits very uncomfortably with me,” he’d said. “Maybe it’s a safety mechanism but I see myself for what I am; a dad and an actor, and those are two very harsh, big truths. All the crap that happened to me came out of a mistake and a situation and a decision that was regrettable, and people say, ‘Oh, you’re not so golden now.’ Well, I never said I was ****ing golden anyway.”

There’s a relentless focus on the supposedly fabulous lives of the rich and famous and beautiful, as Law knows, as we all know, and there’s a concomitant Schadenfreude felt by many when those same rich and famous and beautiful people are perceived to have fallen off their gilded perches. If you are the focus of all this conflicted emotion, it can be seriously discombobulating.

But Law strikes me as a man who, after a fairly terrifying couple of years, has his head pretty firmly screwed on, neither enslaved by his own celebrity, nor afraid of it, nor ashamed. Not any more, anyway. “I am more cynical,” he says, “but I’ve also learnt to be more bulletproof. And I’m not complaining.” Not once in the four days I spent around him, does he say anything to make me believe he wants my pity, or my sympathy, or yours, or anyone else’s. Just maybe a little bit of understanding wouldn’t be too much to ask.

“If we’re talking about a golden life,” he tells me, “I look at myself and I’ve got three golden children, I’m doing a job I love, working with people I respect. If all of that makes it golden, then yes, I’m having a golden life…”

And we drink to that.

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