? Eric O’Neill (Ryan Phillippe) was a newlywed who’d worked for the FBI for about five years when, in late 2000, he was assigned to the newly created Information Assurance Division as the nominal assistant to its top man, a veteran agent and IT genius who’d been a Soviet expert and was nearing retirement. This was Robert Hanssen (Chris Cooper), arrested on February 18, 2001, for selling classified information to the Soviet and Russian governments. Documentary footage of Attorney General John Ashcroft announcing the arrest begins director Billy Ray’s film.
+ If truth is stranger than fiction, Robert Hanssen would be a character to make the point. A member of the Catholic sect Opus Dei, Hanssen was both a deeply religious family man and one who shared Internet postings of himself and his wife having sex, a man with “dump trucks full of hubris,” to use the real O’Neill’s phrase, who was nonetheless a cauldron of resentment due to the bureau’s failure, as he saw it, to properly appreciate his skills. To have seen Chris Cooper in, say Adaptation, where he played a backwoods botanist, and then watch him here is to realize that he’s one of the greatest actors working. Like Ray’s other effort as writer-director, Shattered Glass, it’s a back-office thriller driven by the psychology of its real-life villain and the mild-mannered do-gooder who brings him down, in this case by slowly gaining trust and playing on an enormous ego.
- While Robert Hanssen is more vivid that any ten random fictional characters, Breach is not as suspenseful as Shattered Glass. Although there the ending was equally clear, the tension came from the way Stephen Glass’s peers discover his plagiarist deceit, whereas here O’Neill knows early on what his boss is suspected of. Phillippe’s O’Neill, who gets the most screen time, is less compelling than his on-screen superiors, both Hanssen and his secret FBI contact, played by Laura Linney. We also don’t get to see much of Hanssen’s skullduggery, which nearly all had taken place in the period before that covered by the movie.
= ***1/4 A somber film that’s well worth a look for Cooper’s brilliant portrayal of a most complex character.
IMDB link
reviewed 2/23/07
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