Breach

Grade: B+

Any movie that begins with footage of John Ashcroft can only get better.

This one does. Very quickly.

In 2001, FBI Agent Robert Hanssen pled guilty to 15 counts of espionage against the United States over a period of some 15 years. Shortly thereafter, Eric O’Neill – the cocky, young agent largely responsible for Hanssen’s arrest – resigned from the FBI.

Writer/director Billy Ray has carved himself a moviemaking niche by focusing on the real life stories of flawed individuals and their inevitable falls from grace. Shattered Glass was a breathtaking tale of journalistic fraud, a young reporter who fabricated countless articles and the editor who brought about his downfall. Ray has a striking ability to portray the underlying humanity within his characters, judging but never completely condemning.

Here, in an age of Über-patriotism where the tendency to lock ‘em up and throw away the key Texas cowboy style has permeated our culture, this is no small feat. Hanssen was a traitor, responsible for the loss of numerous lives and billions of dollars. Yet he was also a deeply religious man, devoted to family, desperate for recognition. None of this ultimately matters (as Ray’s very fine screenplay reminds us) but it makes for a fascinatingly rich and profoundly sad character study of a man of great conflict and contradiction. Chris Cooper is quite moving and complicated here, albeit a touch mannered and technical in his approach. He is a mass of contrast – pious and deviant, coldly intellectual yet emotionally driven. Ryan Phillippe is coming into his own, the twink replaced by a thespian, and he plays an up-and-comer with the appropriate mix of bravado and self-doubt. He comes to admire and pity the man he has been assigned to betray, and his polarized obligations to family legacy and family life are as much at the heart of this thriller as the covert operations. Kathleen Quinlan and Caroline Dhavernas are somewhat cardboard cutouts as the women in these men’s lives, one all too eager to bask in spiritual sanctimony while turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to her husband’s political and sexual perversions, the other a bit too quick to forget what her husband does for a living and the life she signed up for, but both serve as steady reminders of the toll people pay inhabiting and segmenting multiple lives.

But the star of the film, and any film (or play) she is in for that matter, is the incomparable Laura Linney, who turns an underwritten supporting player into the very soul of the story. As Phillippe’s superior, Linney is coolly calculating yet utterly compassionate, a woman who has subordinated her life and checked her ego in the service of a greater good. “I don’t even have a cat,” she tells us with chagrined acceptance. She is the truest patriot of all.

The film is well-paced and cinematographer Tak Fujimoto effectively uses broad shots to bring us into the sterile, fluorescent hallways of the FBI. If the occasional cat and mouse cliché or dramatic license sticks out like a sore thumb (O’Neill’s manipulation of Hanssen’s Catholic devotion seems at times particularly contrived) there is much more to be believed than dismissed. It is to Ray’s credit that one is never sure if the film is intended as drama or thriller – sober and unembellished, in a filmmaking age when it is impossible to know precisely what separates a film that declares “this is a true story” from a film “based on a true story” from a film “based on actual events,” it is indeed possible to find truth simply by telling it.

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More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0401997/