Robert Hanssen will go down in history as one of the biggest traitors the U.S. has ever known. This betrayal can be measured in both lives and dollars (billions to be exact). His breach of U.S. security by selling secrets to the Soviet Union leaves behind a legacy of damage to the U.S. intelligence community which will take years to mend.
BREACH (the story of Hanssen's tracking and arrest) is told from a more personal point of view. Chris Cooper plays F.B.I. agent Hanssen as a wounded lion. He brings a sympathetic, yet sickly quality to the part. Hanssen is a man whose appetite for sexual deviancy and machiavellianism has been well documented but here he is also portrayed as devout and idealistic. Ryan Phillippe plays Eric O'Neill, the young F.B.I. operative whose ambition to become an agent unwittingly leads him into a cat and mouse game with this notorious figure. The assignment causes problems in O'Neill's marriage and makes him second guess the wisdom of having a career with the F.B.I. Whether we choose to sympathize with Hanssen or not, the idea that we could see him as a wounded idealist gives the movie a sympathetic flavor. O'Neill, who is forced to lie to his wife and to Hanssen (who trusts him) suffers a similar loss of idealism. He is a mirror for the damaged soul we see trapped behind Cooper's huge, tortured eyes.
It is a fascinating premise, that Hanssen had reasons to do what he did. We get hints that he is driven by a need to please a cold and impersonal father long since dead. We are also shown that Hanssen felt contempt for bureaucracy and wished he had been better recognized by the Bureau over the years. Another idea, barely given screen time, is that people with twisted, intricate minds simply cannot refuse to play the game, to have a chance outwit others. The drive would then be to commit the perfect crime.
The problem I have with BREACH is precisely that we see Hanssen as such a sympathetic human being. Because we sympathize with Hanssen it becomes difficult to fear him, thus there is a squandered sense of jeopardy. Despite O'Neill's assertion that perhaps he is not smart enough to outwit Hanssen, he does so at every turn. Though we all know that Hanssen will be caught, a greater cat and mouse game would have been nice. At the risk of tampering with history, one wonders if a bit more action could have been brought to the page. It would have been nice to see why Hanssen was supposedly so formidable.
The film is still engaging and it is nearly impossible to take your eyes off Cooper. Phillippe holds his own and Laura Linney does an admirable job as O'Neill's supervisor during the operation. Caroline Dhavernas plays O'Neill's wife and though she is rarely on screen, her character comes rather vividly to life during whenever she and Phillippe have a scene. The music by Mychael Danna is also quite good.
Why did Hanssen do it? The point of this film seems to be that while people have reasons for doing the things they do, in the end reasons don't matter in this world. We are the sum total of our actions and nothing can change that. But what kind of movie would we have if we didn't illuminate some of the creepy and fun details along the way?