Breach (2007)

This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

An Exercise In Nonsense

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

Breach is a cat and mouse story, about two real people, an American spy who sells secrets to the Russians and his assistant whose job (along with a large team) it is to catch him.The tension is unrelenting with not even a few seconds of comic relief.Hanson, the spy, is an egotistical, paranoid genius, a sort of Sherlock Holmes type who considers every possibility and notices every detail. Oddly he is fanatical, proselytising Catholic. This made no sense to me. How could someone so involved in logic have been entrapped by the mumbo-jumbo of Catholicism? I gather the real world Hansen was.The basic plot is will our young clerk avoid giving himself away to the master spy? Time pressure drives much of the plot, without being contrived.Chris Cooper's Hansen is as memorable and strange as Hannibal Lecter. Ryan Phillippe usually plays bland exceedingly handsome young men. As Eric O'Neill, he is still handsome, but his character has much more depth and interest.Some of the tech-talk was silly. Some of the computer screens were plagiarised from the Matrix.They put the spy in charge of a new department two months before his retirement. This should have raised his suspicions. Apparently, it did not. His assistant seems to have nothing to do except drive a car every once in a while. To me, this makes no sense.Most of the movie takes place in a grim windowless office.

How do you catch a spy? Very carefully. In this case, the spy worked for the FBI. So, lure him back to the agency and claim he's being "promoted". Also, to add to the mix, give him his own assistant. This is how Robert Hannsen, possibly the most notorious double-agent who spied for Soviet/Russian intelligence was eventually caught.The film begins in the early days of the George W. Bush presidential administration. John Ashcroft is the new Attorney General, head of the Department of Justice, and the FBI resides under that department. Robert Hannsen is brought back to the FBI and told that he is assigned the task of overseeing the technical side of FBI security. He is given an assistant, Eric O'Neill, who, unknown to Hannsen, is a counter-intelligence operative working undercover. O'Neill's task: to monitor Hannsen. Later, he learns the full truth: Hannsen is perhaps the most notorious of spies who traded US secrets to the Soviet Union/Russian State for over two decades. Will O'Neill be able to simultaneously play dutiful but clueless assistant, while trying to uncover the secrets about Hannsen? A good film, which is slightly different than the real story, but mostly on the mark. Apparently, O'Neill knew from the beginning about Hannsen, although in the film, he doesn't find out the whole truth until near midway through. Also, there were several very interesting episodes involving Hannsen prior to his "surveillance" which would have been very interesting to include, such as the recognition of Hannsen's voice on a tape included in a package from a Soviet informant that the government played $7 million for. (An excerpt is played in the film.) Still an excellent film, with highest marks going to Chris Cooper as Hannsen.

Whenever a film I am about to watch is prefaced by the legend 'based on a true story' or a variation of such, my heart sinks. And usually it sinks with good reason. The legend is almost always a studio device to acquire a little something extra for its film, usually duplicitously, which it doesn't deserve. Breach, thank goodness, is the exception which proves the rule.Robert Hannsen, here admirably and interestingly played by Chris Cooper, was a real-life traitor who is now serving life without parole in jail for his treachery. We also know that he was or purported to be - given the unfathomable enigma he presents to this day, how can we know what is true? - a devout Roman Catholic, that he secretly taped videos of himself having sex with his wife and passed the tapes on to a friend, and that to date his only apparent motive for betraying his country and colleagues was money.So far so enigmatic and the raw material of Hannsen's treachery could have made any number of different kinds of films. Director Billy Ray and his scriptwriters take that material and make a rather good film. (I was, by the way, encouraged to watch Breach when I saw that it also stars Laura Linney - I have, to date, not seen her in anything but good and interesting films.) Without grandstanding, fake excitement, car chases or gratuitous sex and violence Ray has made an engrossing film which doesn't strike a single wrong note and oozes suspense - even though we all know what's going to happen. And that in my book constitutes a class act. We are drawn into Ryan Phillippe's dilemma that he cannot tell his wife the truth about his work even though it is in danger of doing serious damage to his marriage. We are drawn into Cooper's weirdly paranoid world and even allowed a suggestion at what might have set him on the road to treachery. But these elements are admirably played - there is no fake drama at all.So sorry all you guys and gals who like a bit of 'action' in your 'spy' films, you ain't going to get it with Breach. But you will get and intelligent, quite gripping drama of a kind not often made.

Here's a film with all the usual suspects of a stylish cat and mouse thriller: agents, double agents, entrapments, liars and loyalties... But as it turns out, these are mere accessories to a script which itself is a weak psychological portrait of an aging spy who doesn't really seem to be fooling anyone after all. Despite my love for Chris Cooper, his all-important character never quite feels dangerous or cunning enough to bring the audience to the edge of their seats. Plus, the writing is relatively flat for this genre - no twists, no complications, no surprises. Not that we always need to be shocked by the turn of movie events, but the plot never develops past the first motivation, to convict "the worst traitor in U.S. History." But we know he is. It's a true story, we already know the basic details. This movie fails to find the drama beneath the account. On the other hand, despite its mediocrities, the movie is still not bad. The camera-work is clean and subtle, the characters are not uninteresting, the acting works... A six star achievement. I only wish I had been convinced by the film that these events had the magnitude for a more dramatic realization.