Breach: Movie & DVD Review (2007)

(Originally published 2007)

It's spy vs. spy in the new thriller "Breach," though only one spy knows that something truly is afoot. The other is left to suspect, with the film's formidable tension mounting from his growing suspicion.

Directed by Billy Ray from a script he co-wrote with Adam Mazer and William Rotko, the film generates a quiet grip, gently tightening its plot until the noose of intrigue it weaves becomes impressively unshakable. That's no small feat, particularly since the movie's outcome is so well known going into it.

Set on the cusp of 2001, the film stars Ryan Phillippe as Eric O'Neill, the real-life surveillance operative who was instrumental in bringing down Robert Hanssen (Chris Cooper), the senior FBI counterintelligence agent who sold security secrets to the former Soviet Union and then to Russia over the course of two decades.

For his trouble, Hanssen made more than $1 million in cash and diamonds, while the United States, facing its biggest and most embarrassing security breach ever, lost untold billions at the hands of Hanssen's deceit.

The movie is as much about how Hanssen was brought down as it is about the man himself, with Cooper nailing the role so convincingly, he likely would have been nominated last night for an Academy Award had the film been released at the end of 2006. His chance for Oscar's attention might come next year, though working against him is the Academy's short memory when it comes to recognizing those films released early in the year.

Still, what a performance. What Cooper gets exactly right is that he doesn't approach Hanssen as if he's a mere monster--that would have been too easy, with nuance lost. Instead, he understands that Hanssen was a hive of contradictions and thus he shades the character with all we've come to know about him. For instance, Hanssen was a staunch conservative and a devout Roman Catholic, attending mass every day (and expecting the same from those close to him), and yet he also was a porn addict, freely distributing videos of him having sex with his clueless wife (Kathleen Quinlan).

With deceit at all levels seeping from his pores, it's no wonder Hanssen was starting to come undone when into his life came O'Neill as his new clerk. Charged into that role by FBI agent Kate Burroughs (Laura Linney), who was one of 500 agents working to build an air-tight case against Hanssen, O'Neill's youth and his lapsed Catholic background proved the perfect hooks to catch Hanssen off guard, though hardly without its share of problems for O'Neill.

Going into the job, he was told he was there only to keep tabs on a sexual deviant. Turns out that the FBI misled him and that the case was more far-reaching than that. What the talented Phillippe mines from this is his best, most convincing role to date, one that joins Cooper's in that he rises above the script's lapses into stock genre convention to focus on what really matters--the psychological complexities of O'Neill and Hanssen's unusual relationship.

Grade: B+