From Billy Ray, the director of Shattered Glass, comes another tale of two-faced betrayal and duplicity run amok. At least you can say that former journalist Stephen Glass, while being a plagiarist, a liar and a charlatan, didn’t compound his crimes with murder and treason. Robert Hanssen was an FBI agent arrested in 2001, after spying for the Russians and compromising US national security for a quarter of a century. Breach is an interesting true life spy tale that makes an odd sort of companion for another recently released, based on a true spy tale, The Good Shepherd.



Hanssen was a pious, straight-laced agent with great analytical skills and an expert on Russia and the Soviet Union. He may have been overly critical of FBI protocols and patronage, but you wouldn’t know to look at him that he was passing intel to the Russians that resulted in a loss of billions of dollars, thousands of man hours and the deaths of about four dozen human assets and that’s just what the Bureau knows about so far. Academy Award winning actor Chris Cooper plays Hanssen and Ryan Phillippe plays Eric O’Neill, a young agent assigned with getting close to Hanssen and helping the task force build a case against him using that access. The investigation causes stress for O’Neill as he struggles with keeping work and personal separate, and trying to balance the myriad of lies he’s telling just to get the job done.



With none of the usual trappings of a spy picture, Breach is really an actor’s showcase for Cooper and Phillippe. Cooper plays the straight-arrow really well and with a certain kind of sub-surface boiling intensity. Cooper is definitely one of the finest character actors currently working and he does some great stuff with the material, but there’s something that bothered me about the Hanssen character. Basically I have a hard time believing in the Hanssen presented in this movie; there are just certain points where he is too broadly drawn, like when he tells O’Neill that the key to reducing work-related stress is more prayer. For me, the whole hyper-religiousness of Hanssen was too easy a character aspect to focus on. It’s worth saying that Ryan Phillippe is also doing quite well for himself as an actor. Between Breach and Flags of Our Fathers he’s turning in some of the best acting I think he’s ever done. It’s hard to believe that this is the same guy from I Know What You Did Last Summer and Cruel Intentions.



Breach is a taut and occasionally exciting spy thriller that operates from a compelling place of character action rather than gadgets and explosions. Still though, I think that the story is presented rather simplistically with Hanssen’s obsessive faith, giving him a creepy sheen that always fosters doubt about his character. At the end of the day, it’s a decent movie that’s well made with an electric cast. What more could you want?