Agent double

The FBI has finally identified a top level traitor who during the Cold War and afterwards sold costly secrets to the Communist bloc. It's not someone in a million years you would suspect. Robert Hanssen, a person of no apparent vices, a very religious Catholic, a member of Opus Dei, loving husband, father, and grandfather, as All American as you can get.

His espionage cost America dear, the trick now is to get him caught in the act so he can go away for a very long time, maybe even be subject to capital punishment. He's a clever guy Hansseen, as chief investigator Laura Linney says, he'd spot a phony cover story in a nano-second. Send someone in at first, but don't tell them the whole reason for the investigation.

Playing Robert Hanssen is Chris Cooper and the mole sent to catch a mole, Ryan Phillippe. Most of the film is a battle of wits between the two of them. The film takes on a whole different perspective however when Phillippe is told the real reason for the intense investigation of Cooper.

What's nice about Breach and what probably won't draw in the action fans is there is a minimum of violence in the film. Instead it's a character study of two men, fighting what seems to be an uneven battle of wits. Phillippe quite frankly seems overmatched at times, but he does think on his feet. Cooper is nobody's fool, mainly because he's fooled everybody for decades.

Favorite scene in the film is Cooper trying to articulate the reason for the treason to agent in charge, Dennis Haysbert. What it essentially comes down to is he's a brilliant man who's angry because he never got the respect he feels he deserved. He was going to show everyone just how smart he was.

Strange are the things that can make a traitor, spy, or terrorist. Though it does get slow at times, I think people will enjoy Breach and see a great acting duel with Cooper and Phillippe.

I was surprised at how effective this was. You know from the very beginning how it will end. You know because it is a true story that there will be no trendy plot twists. You expect, and find, that the young assistant is built around a cliché, as is Hanssen's Catholicism, which oddly ignores the role of Opus Dei in this venture, and focuses on prayer instead of devotion.

And there is a formulaic bit about damaging fathers and odd wives. More: there's the project command center that is drawn from movies and not from life. And finally, our hero is told the FBI's biggest secret in an open public place. This would never ever happen, and it is staged this way only to help the pacing of the thing in terms of stagecraft. And that DIA computer room, with the nice clean Cray-like machines, is from the same fantasy world as "Red October's" neon-lighted missile tubes.

But in spite of all this, it works. And especially compared to "The Departed," it works, simply, cleanly, deeply.

That's because the filmmaker decided early in the game that he was going to do what the Hong Kong "Infernal Affairs" did well and others copied: this business of actors playing characters who are actors. In this case, we have two such in the same boat.

We have a top information manager at the FBI working for the Russians and acting normal, even when leading the hunt for himself. We have the young under cover guy pretending to be simply a clerk. Each intuits the other is watching. The older man completely wins at the start, with the younger man eventually besting him in artifice. Its a calculation that the filmmaker makes, when deciding not to tell us why our young hero does what he does and where he gets the tools. In an ordinary story, that would hurt, but here it is a wise decision because such "explaining" would get in the way of the economy of the thing. And it is all about economic connection with us.

Its a bit counterintuitive that effective stories sometimes get better by lopping off story elements and information. But it is true. Some students of the Hanssen case believe that Hanssen's primary motive was to show his own importance (as a information security planner) by revealing holes in the system that he would have plugged. I wish this film would have worked with that a bit, because this notion of helping the system by hurting is system is both what the story could have been about and the means used to tell the story.

Still, a good one.

As a historical note, there's a reason folks from the FBI and CIA, even senior ones, can't wander into NSA computing facilities. Hanssen wasn't allowed, probably a good thing at the time. Opus Dei again.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

"Breach" is slow - slow enough to recommend waiting to rent for most people. It is a good story, but the material requires the methodical pacing that will bore viewers hoping for car chases and gun fights.

The most authentic part of the movie is its attention to detail. The interior shots look like the drab, boring government offices they portray. This wonderfully realistic touch will be lost on those that haven't toiled in such holes; it is nice that a movie finally depicts a governmental office that looks like one, instead of a futuristic, gleaming movie version that has more in common with the starship Enterprise.

Intentionally or not, the drabness goes beyond the office spaces (apologies to - yeahhh - Gary Cole). Laura Linney's hair is flat and dull, and she's as pale as a ghost. All of the exterior shots are cloudy with a 70% chance of showers, like DC all winter long. The somber look of the movie enhances theme, but will probably leave some viewers with a bad taste.

As a retired intelligence analyst, I enjoyed this movie because it reminds us that traitors exist, and they cause damage to our national security. Like "United 93" it isn't easy or enjoyable to watch, but the subject matter is thought provoking.

The performances were all just fine, the story had the potential to be intriguing, the characterizations ought to have been riveting.

Why then, was this movie so ho-hum? It felt like the director and writers didn't know what story they were trying to tell. Was it a character study of a traitor? No, we don't get much depth on Hanssen. Was it a taut thriller? No, there weren't thrills to speak of, and no real twists or turns. Was it an inside-the-FBI potboiler? No, we didn't learn much about the bureaucracy of intelligence.

At times, there were glimmers of each of these stories, but never any depth on any them. I felt like we skated along the surface of a story that would have been much more interesting viewed from underneath the ice.

I don't recommend spending the time on this, unless you really like looking at Ryan Phillipe. I do, and it still didn't elevate it.

On February 18, 2001, Robert Hanssen, a 56-year old FBI agent, was arrested, by the very agency he worked for, for selling secrets to the Russians. He was sentenced to life in prison after pleading guilty to 15 charges of espionage. This is widely considered to be the worst case of treason in the history of American intelligence.

"Breach" looks at the story through the eyes of Eric O'Neill, the young, up-and-coming junior agent assigned by investigators in the bureau to spy on Hanssen. In the position of personal assistant to Hanssen, O'Neill works to uncover evidence against his boss that will help to strengthen the legal case gradually being built against him.

"Breach" is a fairly solid political thriller, less concerned with big action scenes than with examining the relationship between these two very different men set in unwitting opposition to one another. Hanssen himself is a mass of immense hypocrisies and contradictions. A devout Catholic, he attends Mass religiously, recites the rosary everyday, and looks with disdain upon homosexuals, women who wear pants and anybody seemingly to the left politically of Rush Limbaugh and Ronald Reagan. Yet, despite his outward display of moral rectitude, Hanssen secretly distributes porn videos of his wife (she is unaware of their existence) and betrays his country by turning over classified information to the enemy. O'Neill finds himself simultaneously drawn to and repulsed by the man, who manages to be both prig and libertine at one and the same time. O'Neill knows that what Hanssen is doing is terribly wrong, yet he can't help falling under the spell of a man he knows that, under other circumstances, he might well come to value as a friend and a mentor.

Ryan Philippe is subtle and brooding as the taciturn O'Neill, reluctant to condemn the man he's been sent to bring down until all the facts are in. It's true that his performance is a bit of a Johnny-one-note at times, but since the function of the character is that of observer rather than catalyst, Philippe's self-effacing underplaying seems the right editorial choice here. Plus, it clears the deck for Chris Cooper to step to the forefront with his finely-tuned interpretation of Hanssen that brings real dimensionality and depth to the film. He turns Hanssen into a richly complex figure, a man who demands strict adherence to form yet who systematically violates that very rule at the deepest core of his own being. A stickler for protocol and standards and unforgiving of those who fall short of them, Hanssen somehow fails to see his own glaring weaknesses while managing to condemn others for theirs. Through his perceptive performance, Cooper makes it possible for us to see this walking paradox in all his complexity and humanity.

The movie itself, written by Adam Mazer, William Rotko and Billy Ray, and directed by Ray, is a trifle plodding at times and doesn't feel as vital as perhaps it should given the seriousness of the issues it is addressing, but, for the most part, we welcome its unfrenetic approach to the subject. It doesn't try to gin up the melodrama or unravel its human enigma - rather it presents him as truthfully and impartially as possible, then leaves it up to the viewer to render the final judgment.