Breach

In 2001, a senior FBI agent Robert Hanssen, was arrested for spying. Not any old spying though. Hanssen had been selling US secrets to the Russians for over 20 years and is considered to be the worst spy in history. Orgiven that he got away with is so long, perhaps that should be the best?

Breach, starring Chris Cooper as Hanssen and Ryan Phillippe as Agent Chuck Useless (possibly not his real name) covers the 2 months prior to Hanssen's arrest. Phillippe is plucked from his daring mission spying on foreign men and their pregnant wives (terrorists obviously) and sent to work in a sterile office as Hanssen's assistant. Except he's no ordinary assistant because he's actually there to spy on Hanssen who we're told is a bit of a sexual deviant and may cause embarrassment to the Bureau.. Spycatcher and Hanssen quickly go from being treating each other with suspicion and contempt to going to church and spending Sunday lunch together and then back to suspicion and contempt and back again etc. It must've been an emotional 2 months. Just when he's starting to think that Hansssen is actually an alright guy, our boy learns that not only is Hanssen a deviant, but he's also a spy for the Russians. Considering he's just been eating cake in Hanssen's house and wasn't prepared to believe that his buddy was even a pervert, Spycatcher takes the news well and devotes lots of time to catching the bad guy. Even at the expense of his marriage. Goddammit.

Cooper, as always, is terrific. From Matewan and Lone Star to American Beauty and Adaptation he brings a dignified grace to proceedings. Even though we know he's a spy (the ending is at the start) he manages to fill the role with enough humanity to keep you wondering about his motivations. Phillippe, on the other hand, is a shambles. I've been reading a lot of interviews with him lately about how he's shying away from 'movie star' roles and trying, instead, to do more varied work that'll help to develop his range. He should start by trying to develop more varied expressions. From the emotional scenes with his wife (both tender and tense) to the early getting-to-know-you scenes with Cooper and through to the inevitable face off in the forest, he invests all his scenes with the same blank expression. While Cooper broods and simmers and rages, Phillippe wanders through with the look of a guy who's stepped off the set of a teen movie and can't find his way back.

In the end, the arrest of Hanssen seems so straighforward that you wonder why they needed Agent Chuck at all. Apart from goading Hanssen into making the final drop-off with the Russians (something he wouldn't have had to do if he hadn't been so rubbish at his job in the first place) his character adds absolutely nothing to the investigation. You can't help but wonder why they hadn't just followed and arrested Hanssen years ago.

This is cinema of course and I'm sure it wasn't like that in real life. It couldn't have been. Most of the time I sat there wondering how the filmmakers could have taken such an interesting story and made such a dull film out of it. On the plus side, Laura Linney and Gary Cole are both decent as FBI suity types. Ultimately it's Cooper's film though. He's rarely been better and while Breach is a bit of a fudged attempt to tell an interestign story, it's still well worth a look.