Breach is a pretty damn entertaining cat and mouse spy thriller–the kind where one is never quite sure who’s the cat and who’s the mouse. Director Billy Ray tells us exactly what’s going to happen in the first 30 seconds (well, John Ashcroft does) and for the next 110 minutes, you’re on the edge of your seat trying to figure out what actually is going to happen. That alone seems worth celebrating. Oh, I don’t know, it’s probably not as good as all that, but we are in the February doldrums (the flaming Nic Cage pic made $15 million on Friday!), and Breach is a smart, unpretentiously ambitious genre flick that works on a variety of levels and is acted to the hilt by Laura Linney, Gary Cole, Ryan Phillipe and, in perhaps his strongest performance in an already stellar career, Chris Cooper. It’s also one of the most virulent pieces of anti-Catholic propaganda I’ve seen on the big screen in a long time.
I’ve never been much of a Cooper fan–he always seems to be playing stern fathers and stoic generals and oily, unctious corporate types, but he digs deep into the complex layers of Robert Hanssen, and just as Phillipe’s superagent on the rise begins to wonder if maybe the FBI has got the wrong man–Hanssen’s “performance” is too irresistible to resist–the audience starts asking the same questions. The film reminded me a lot of Donnie Brasco though the domestic scenes between Phillipe and his German wife are little more than superfluous. Two additional responses: if the audience reaction to an ugly sexist comment is any indication of things to come, Hillary Clinton doesn’t have a chance in hell.
[BREACH SPOILER] ultimately, we are not given to understand why robert hanssen spies and what his catholicism has to do with it. the film’s explicit answer is that there is no why, and even if there were one it wouldn’t matter anyway. i liked this movie quite a bit. i have to say that, as a catholic, i didn’t feel attacked. hanssen is portrayed as latching onto faith in large part for the expiatory comfort it provides, and that seems fair enough to me. his faith is a mostly private affair, or at least as private as being part of the human consortium (having a family, etc.) allows. i know that attacking evil-doing religious people as hypocritical is one of our favorite national sports, often legitimately so, but certainly the relation between faith and behavior is more complicated than the simple label of hypocrisy allows. we can’t routinely expect religious people to be more virtuous than non-religious people. that would be placing a heavy burden on other people’s shoulders without being willing to touch it ourselves.
writer/director billy ray’s take on hanssen’s catholicism seems interesting and nuanced to me. one feels sympathy for the agony that someone who’s pulled by such contrasting forces must be plagued by. ray does a good job at showing that being torn by irreconciliable passions is, at the end of the day, the very essence of the human condition. in a less tragic way, the ryan philippe character and the laura linney character are torn by contrasting desires and passions, too. one chooses the lesser evil, or whatever feels more honorable or more appropriate or more convenient to one.
i love these graham greenesque psycho-moral dramas about choosing the kind of person we want to be. thankfully, life is hardly ever this dramatic, yet these fictions feel remarkably real.
i agree with jeff that cooper, linney, and philippe are rather splendid. philippe is the right mixture of youthful cockiness and psychological baldness, and linney is really excellent at being the late-thirties woman who’s made her choice and is just fine living with it.
I’m with Gio entirely–I think I loved this film. I found myself for a few days after viewing with uncertainty about who was responsible for the title’s “breach,” or what it might signify. Certainly Hanssen’s crimes, and/or the complementary gaps between his public, private, and individual behaviors, fit the bill. But as in Ray’s last film (the fine Shattered Glass), the point doesn’t seem to be to demonize the moral failings of a central real-life criminal but to use the instance to circle around the moral complexities of human relationships.
The actors in Breach were great, particularly in tandem–all those great two person scenes with Philippe as common fulcrum, being barked at or connecting with first Cooper then Linney.
I also really relished how the film resisted explanation, letting Hanssen’s motivations seem multiple or mysterious. Rather than a gap in the plot, it seemed to echo something about faith, behavior, morality — all of the characters grappled with concerns about how we choose to act with one another and with ourselves . . . I find myself returning to Gio’s points. Good movie.
am i the only one who was underwhelmed by this? it held my attention but i thought it was more derivative than original. the “spy-hunt” bits were laboured–and didn’t fit with the psychological drama. the cost of this stuff being in the film was that the relationship between phillippe and cooper was not articulated well: hanssen’s gullibility about phillippe’s lame alibis came from what? his catholic guilt? his desire to abuse a son figure of his own? i would have liked to have seen more done with that and less searching of cars and desks while hanssen threatens to return unexpectedly early. and the sub-plot with phillippe’s wife was annoying (not to mention it was completely implausible that uber-paranoid hanssen would not have got to the bottom of the pager thing after one conversation with her).
cooper was very good. phillippe was okay. linney did a plausible joan allen impression.