Breach (2007)

Purely Joyful Movie!

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

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.

"America's state religion is patriotism, a phenomenon which has convinced many that 'treason' is morally worse than murder or rape." - William Blum "Breach" stars Chris Cooper as Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent who spends two decades selling state secrets to the Soviet Union. In an attempt to gather incriminating evidence against Hanssen, the FBI assign agent Eric O'Neill (Ryan Phillippe) to work undercover as Hanssen's clerk."Breach" oozes Sigmund Freud. It finds Hanssen betraying his nation because he believes that it is responsible for his anonymity and impotency. Like an ignored son, Hanssen thus lashes out, desperately clamouring for "daddy" to notice him. Of course "daddy" - The Big Other qua Nation State – eventually does. Not tolerating any other avenues of power beyond its own, the United States Government promptly crushes Hanssen.The film's Oedipism extend to O'Neill. O'Neill comes from a long line of government foot-soldiers, a calling he initially rejects. But feeling that he has betrayed both the state-as-father and his literal father, O'Neill eventually joins the FBI. In short, O'Neill does the State's bidding in order to ingratiate himself with a "daddy" he feels he has abandoned, whilst Hanssen betrays the State because he feels as though "daddy" has first abandoned him. Elsewhere the film delves into Hanssen's obsession with both Catholicism and sex, the former a form of guilty penance, the latter a feeble means of asserting control.Though riveting, "Breach" isn't as good as the best "undercover" movies ("Serpico", "The Spy Who Came In From the Cold", "Donnie Brasco", "Army of Shadows", "Molly Maguires", "The Falcon and the Snowman", "Prince of the City" etc). It's too apolitical, too scared to question blind fidelity to Western Super Imperialists and their federal bodies. Indeed, "Breach" ends with text reminding us that Hanssen's leaks led to "government assets dying", a bit of emotional blackmail whose interrogation a better artist would make this film actually about. The film's stance is particularly timid in light of recent revelations surrounding full-spectrum, global surveillance; the United States now deems all of its citizens guilty of defacto treason.On the level of psycho-drama and character study, however, "Breach" is excellent. Cooper is fascinating as Hanssen – simultaneously creepy, pathetic and endearing – and the film is beautifully lit, shot, and remains quietly engrossing throughout. Caroline Dhavernas co-stars as O'Neill's clichéd "uppity wife".7.9/10 – See "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold".

This was pretty good for such a dry, slow-burning movie, it drags at times but still manages to keep a level of tension and suspense going throughout and I id end up really enjoying this. Ultimately it was the strong performances from both Chris Cooper and Ryan Phillippe that saved this for me.Cooper is intense and creepy here displaying a range of mystique. Laura Linney as his handler was quite bitchy. Ryan plays an FBI Trainee who is assigned to keep en eye on a fellow agent suspected of selling information to the soviets. Its his first real case and initially he's not even sure what he's looking for. 7/17/14

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.