Chris Knipp
03-10-2007, 12:58 PM
BILLY RAY: BREACH (2007)
Satan wears gray
Review by Chris Knipp
Billy Ray is interested in betrayal. His previous film, the 2003 Shattered Glass, concerned the young New Republic writer who got caught out making a name for himself by inventing fake stories. Stephen Glass betrayed the trust of all his editors and wrecked his own career. Ray has gone into darker territory with Robert Hanssen -- the worst spy in US history, a puzzling and profoundly repellent man. Hanssen betrayed his agency, his government, and his country and sold millions of dollars worth of secrets to Russia. As Breach begins, the FBI, for which he works, has pinpointed Hanssen and transferred him out of the action, but supervisor Kate Burroughs (Laura Linney), part of a team seeking to gather evidence to convict him, tells his new assistant, rookie agent-trainee Eric O'Neill (Ryan Phillippe) only that his new boss is a sex deviant. This is true, but relatively minor. Later O'Neill learns the whole story, and then with his knowledge and proximity to the target, the tension mounts. O'Neill may seem a harmless if dedicated drone, but in collecting evidence against Hanssen his role becomes crucial.
The recent and fine German film The Lives of Others is another take on spying as it pervaded the lives of those behind the Berlin Wall. The world of secrecy and mistrust deemed necessary by the guardians of empire is not a safe world but one in which betrayals can be hidden and dangers multiplied. It's a world so foolish in The Lives of Others a devious man sets another drone to watching the country's most loyal intellectual, and in Breach an earlier committee to find the leak was headed by Hanssen himself.
The spy world is not only absurd and menacing but abnormally constricted. Breach is a color film that's so gray and dull you remember it as black and white, but the grayness is evocative and chilling. This isn't about car chases and gangs of armed men closing in on an abandoned building. It's about dining out with a buttoned-down monster, being lectured on Catholicism by a man who sends someone tapes of himself having sex with is wife. It's photocopying, anxious downloading off a palm pilot, taping secrets up in garbage bags and leaving them under bridges in a DC park. It's covering up who's calling when a beeper goes off. It's not successes so much as it's avoiding errors. It's living with paranoia, but not with action. This grayness is Breach's triumph. Here at last is an American account of what the hard relentless grind of real spying is like.
The film does generate some considerable excitement and suspense. After all, it's about the capture of a traitor. But what raises our pulses is just such things as the effort to keep Hanssen away while his car or his data are being gone over. No one is running. One of the tensest moments is in an off-highway DC traffic jam. The whole danger is that Hanssen may get out and walk. It's O'Neill's crucial job to talk him back into the car.
This in short is a film not of action but acting. All its power radiates out of Chris Cooper. He played a tormented, repressed fake patriot well in American Beauty. He has played cops or intelligence agency execs well often. But this time he's allowed to bring all these characteristics and all his special gifts together at center stage, and he's never nailed a better role. Cooper has an actor's oversensitive ravaged face, the kind that looks as if it's registered so many emotions it's gone slack, leaving only twitches of hidden fear and repressed rage. It's hard to imagine a better man for the role. He's been accused of overacting, but this is a guy near the end of his tether, an egomaniac virtually out of control. His state is set off against the restrained diligence of O'Neill. Phillippe, who played a young man hunting down hidden wrongdoing before in the 2001 computer conspiracy story Antitrust, is also well cast. He inhabits with some strength and restraint his role of young man hungry to be best, whose whole goal in life is to be promoted to Agent. There's no need for complexity in O'Neill: but isn't finding a role model and then discovering he's a world-class traitor pretty complex in itself? Laura Linney as his supervisor as usual is excellent, and these three actors carry the film.
A criticism that's been leveled at Breach is that Hanssen is incomprehensible. That's quite incorrect: he himself lists all his motives at the moment of capture, while concluding that none matter: he's a spy, that's all we need to know. What these critics mean is they can't project themselves into this character. Hanssen is interesting -- troubling -- not sympathetic. He is like Milton's Satan. Inside is a whirlwind of contradiction and torment. Breach is far simpler than Robert De Niro's CIA epic The Good Shepherd and perhaps better, truer. But the two films compliment each other. Both examine tormented individual lives to show what American spy-craft and counterintelligence are and have been like. The breathless Bourne franchise and Le Carré's stylish cold war meditations are fun, but this gets closer to the real thing.
©Chris Knipp 2007
Satan wears gray
Review by Chris Knipp
Billy Ray is interested in betrayal. His previous film, the 2003 Shattered Glass, concerned the young New Republic writer who got caught out making a name for himself by inventing fake stories. Stephen Glass betrayed the trust of all his editors and wrecked his own career. Ray has gone into darker territory with Robert Hanssen -- the worst spy in US history, a puzzling and profoundly repellent man. Hanssen betrayed his agency, his government, and his country and sold millions of dollars worth of secrets to Russia. As Breach begins, the FBI, for which he works, has pinpointed Hanssen and transferred him out of the action, but supervisor Kate Burroughs (Laura Linney), part of a team seeking to gather evidence to convict him, tells his new assistant, rookie agent-trainee Eric O'Neill (Ryan Phillippe) only that his new boss is a sex deviant. This is true, but relatively minor. Later O'Neill learns the whole story, and then with his knowledge and proximity to the target, the tension mounts. O'Neill may seem a harmless if dedicated drone, but in collecting evidence against Hanssen his role becomes crucial.
The recent and fine German film The Lives of Others is another take on spying as it pervaded the lives of those behind the Berlin Wall. The world of secrecy and mistrust deemed necessary by the guardians of empire is not a safe world but one in which betrayals can be hidden and dangers multiplied. It's a world so foolish in The Lives of Others a devious man sets another drone to watching the country's most loyal intellectual, and in Breach an earlier committee to find the leak was headed by Hanssen himself.
The spy world is not only absurd and menacing but abnormally constricted. Breach is a color film that's so gray and dull you remember it as black and white, but the grayness is evocative and chilling. This isn't about car chases and gangs of armed men closing in on an abandoned building. It's about dining out with a buttoned-down monster, being lectured on Catholicism by a man who sends someone tapes of himself having sex with is wife. It's photocopying, anxious downloading off a palm pilot, taping secrets up in garbage bags and leaving them under bridges in a DC park. It's covering up who's calling when a beeper goes off. It's not successes so much as it's avoiding errors. It's living with paranoia, but not with action. This grayness is Breach's triumph. Here at last is an American account of what the hard relentless grind of real spying is like.
The film does generate some considerable excitement and suspense. After all, it's about the capture of a traitor. But what raises our pulses is just such things as the effort to keep Hanssen away while his car or his data are being gone over. No one is running. One of the tensest moments is in an off-highway DC traffic jam. The whole danger is that Hanssen may get out and walk. It's O'Neill's crucial job to talk him back into the car.
This in short is a film not of action but acting. All its power radiates out of Chris Cooper. He played a tormented, repressed fake patriot well in American Beauty. He has played cops or intelligence agency execs well often. But this time he's allowed to bring all these characteristics and all his special gifts together at center stage, and he's never nailed a better role. Cooper has an actor's oversensitive ravaged face, the kind that looks as if it's registered so many emotions it's gone slack, leaving only twitches of hidden fear and repressed rage. It's hard to imagine a better man for the role. He's been accused of overacting, but this is a guy near the end of his tether, an egomaniac virtually out of control. His state is set off against the restrained diligence of O'Neill. Phillippe, who played a young man hunting down hidden wrongdoing before in the 2001 computer conspiracy story Antitrust, is also well cast. He inhabits with some strength and restraint his role of young man hungry to be best, whose whole goal in life is to be promoted to Agent. There's no need for complexity in O'Neill: but isn't finding a role model and then discovering he's a world-class traitor pretty complex in itself? Laura Linney as his supervisor as usual is excellent, and these three actors carry the film.
A criticism that's been leveled at Breach is that Hanssen is incomprehensible. That's quite incorrect: he himself lists all his motives at the moment of capture, while concluding that none matter: he's a spy, that's all we need to know. What these critics mean is they can't project themselves into this character. Hanssen is interesting -- troubling -- not sympathetic. He is like Milton's Satan. Inside is a whirlwind of contradiction and torment. Breach is far simpler than Robert De Niro's CIA epic The Good Shepherd and perhaps better, truer. But the two films compliment each other. Both examine tormented individual lives to show what American spy-craft and counterintelligence are and have been like. The breathless Bourne franchise and Le Carré's stylish cold war meditations are fun, but this gets closer to the real thing.
©Chris Knipp 2007