The first image that awkwardly-titled, based-on-a-true-story spy thriller Breach throws at the viewer is news footage of ex-Attorney General John Ashcroft announcing, during one of his many grandstanding press conferences, the capture of Robert Hanssen, America’s most successful double-agent, who worked as a mole inside the FBI for years before finally being brought down in February of 2001.
There are few faces more divisive and polarizing than that of Ashcroft, so it’s perhaps as good a place as any for Shattered Glass director Billy Ray to begin his tale, as it is essentially a story about reluctantly sympathizing with a devil, a man who one could love or hate depending on the angle you view him from and how much you know about him.
Hanssen is an evil scumbag who betrayed his country, costing it billions of dollars in damage and at least three agents their lives, sure. But he was also brilliant, clear-sighted and easy to admire, as the young agent assigned to catch him, Eric O’Neill (Ryan Phillipe) comes to find out.
Ray’s relay of the Ashcroft announcement gives away the ending right out of the gate, but that’s fine—anyone who’s read the news reports, or any of the hal-dozen books about Hanssen, or seen the 20/20 special or made-for-TV movie already knows where this is going anyway.
It’s the suspense of how we get to that pre-ordained ending that’s the thing, and Ray and his two leads wring bucket loads of it from the situation; sometimes in straightforward ways (will the good spy be able to replace the swiped Palm Pilot/log off te computer/get out of the office before the bad spy returns?!), but more often in the form of the mind games the two principals play with one another.
Essentially, Breach (as in “worst breach in the history of U.S. intelligence;” it sucks, I know, but Master Spy and Spycatcher were already taken by previous retellings) is the story of a brilliant old liar who played all of Washington D.C. for fools while selling secrets to the Russians, and the brilliant young liar who is assigned to play him for a fool. Among the pleasant ironies is that to catch the traitor, Phillipe’s character must betray his boss-cum-father figure.
Phillipe’s performance is a convincing one, as he studiously acts like a lightweight and pushover while worming his way into Cooper’s character’s heart. Cooper plays Hanssen as a sort of surly human lie detector in a suit, but he soon morphs into a Mr. Miyagi sort of master testing a pupil and, ultimately, a sad old man seemingly committing treason just to feel important.
Hanssen’s a dichotomous man—he’s a pious and zealous Catholic who attends Latin mass with his wife and plays in the yard with his beloved grandchildren, but also mails tapes of rough sex with his wife to others and keeps a trunk full of machine guns. He was a traitor, and yet Ray is sure to let us know that in some ways, he really was smarter than the FBI. He refuses to play the foolish bureaucratic “organizational turf protection” that kept the CIA and FBI from sharing info, and at one point says, “the enemies of our country aren’t so picky; the bureau hasn’t learned that lesson yet.”
This is no hatchet job on Hanssen then, nor a patriotic celluloid stroking of the FBI’s ego. What it is is an intimate feeling, character-driving spy thriller, a current events companion to The Good Shepherd’s history lesson.
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