Review of “Breach”
At home Robert Hanssen lived a double life. He was a suburban father of six, a strict Catholic and member of Opus Dei, but also a man who secretly filmed his own sex-life and had a bizarre long-term relationship with a stripper. This duplicity extended to his work life: he was a well-respected FBI employee with 25 years service, but sold secrets to the Russians for most of that time. The information he sold – for US$1.4 million in cash and diamonds - became known as the worst breach of American intelligence in history, and was responsible for the deaths of at least two people. It is Hanssen’s story that forms the basis of the film Breach.
With so much already known about the real case, director Billy Ray decided to focus on the relationship between Hanssen and Eric O’Neill, the young agent who was secretly assigned to be Hanssen’s assistant and spy on him, hoping to expose his traitorous activities before he left the service for retirement. Ray was fortunate enough to involve the real Eric O’Neill to help create the screenplay (written by Adam Mazer and William Rotko) and the result is a realistically tense story of two men and the extent to which they can and should trust each other. In an interview, O’Neill said that the key event of the film, the “borrowing” of Hanssen’s palm pilot for just long enough to download the secret data it contained, occurs exactly as it did in real life.
Chris Cooper is brilliant as the enigmatic and grumpy spy Hanssen, playing out the most dangerous game in the world in the last days of his career. Although he knows that he shouldn’t trust O’Neill (Ryan Phillippe), the two men connect, partly because of their faith, but mostly because of O’Neill’s decision to play it straight with Hanssen, disarming him with his naïve honesty and a genuine respect for the older man whom he comes to admire. Phillippe is a good match for Cooper, stronger when he’s quieter, but looking a little stretched in scenes where he has to fire up in the fight for his career or his marriage. The screenplay is a long way from of the action-packed James Bond variety of espionage, but rather tackles the genre from the inside, building tension from the psychological stakes between the two men, and focusing on the small moments that could give away everything, even a life.
Ultimately though, the film doesn’t quite break its own restraints. It’s subtle and slow to get going, more mouse than cat in the game of spy versus spy. Director Ray carefully avoids making Hanssen a monster, but chooses not to explore some rich contradictory avenues of his character – his Catholicism and strange sexual behaviour, his bitterness and brilliance. These may have added the complexity we needed to understand his motivations for a lifetime of deception, a question ultimately left unanswered. We leave with the film with a strong sense of how the game is played, but not why.
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