***/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras A-
starring Chris Cooper, Ryan Phillippe, Laura Linney, Dennis Haysbert
screenplay by Adam Mazer & William Rotko and Billy Ray
directed by Billy Ray
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Breach is so good, you want it to be better; it's a tense, relentless, Alan-Pakula-in-marble chiller that sketches the schizoid ways of its real-life subject so effectively that you're eager to know more than the genre trappings can accommodate. This would be of greater cause for concern were Breach not already, as it is, much better written and light-years better directed than most of its brethren in the Washington-intrigue sub-genre. Make no mistake: it has an iron grip on the spine, and its refreshingly quiet approach eschews rapid montage for unnerving negative space. You hear every line instead of noticing the pictures, even as the pictures work overtime–and the aggregate is sweetly enthralling, if somewhat incomplete.
Based on the story of the largest security breach in U.S. history (a case that conveniently wrapped only months before 9/11), it follows the progress of surveillance operative Eric O'Neill (Ryan Phillippe) as he's asked to spy on retiring senior agent Robert Hanssen (Chris Cooper). At first, O'Neill is told that his quarry is merely a "sexual deviant" they're hoping to weed out before he embarrasses the Bureau. Hanssen, however, proves to be a bolt-upright, conservative, Catholic patriot whom the younger man almost comes to admire for his principles. It's then that the greater truth is revealed: Hanssen, aside from being a pervert, is selling secrets to the Soviets and consequently responsible for the deaths of several American agents. They need to catch him–preferably before the rookie reaches the proverbial point of no return in infiltrating O'Neill's life.
The film is at once well-drawn and not well-drawn enough: for a thriller, it's great, but for a true portrait of Hanssen in all his depraved glory, it's somehow insufficient. The idea of this rigid conservative violating every precept he publicly espouses cries out for exegesis, yet Breach is content to give us a complex monster rather than a well-explained person. Still, co-writer/director Billy Ray (of Shattered Glass fame) does a fine job of plugging the various holes that crop up; watching O'Neill turn into a perpetual-dishonesty machine around both his "boss" and his wife Juliana (an unfortunately hysterical Caroline Dhavernas) makes for gratifyingly creepy viewing. And while one is pretty much asked to pledge allegiance to the flag in order to enter the narrative, if you commit to the film's straight-arrow streamline, you should have no problems in getting on board.
I suppose I rue the film that might have been–one that would centre on Hanssen's twisted reasons and flip-flop ideology that caused him to pretend to be the things he absolutely wasn't. But there's no denying that as a monster, he's pretty persuasive–especially as embodied by Cooper, who turns in a performance that's at once un-showy and entirely credible. If Breach doesn't ask questions about ideology and psychology, it's at the very least extremely skilful in delineating its cat-and-mouse game as performed by other agents who are just as manipulative (and whose lives are similarly consumed–and damaged–by their Bureau activities) as the throbbing contradiction they pursue. Though it's not genius, it'll sate your appetite for espionage all the same.
THE DVD
by Bill Chambers Universal ushers Breach to DVD in a mediocre 1.87:1 anamorphic widescreen presentation.* Some monstrous combination of edge-enhancement and noise-reduction appears to have been applied, turning the image into a murky soup with deceptive pockets of clarity. Master cinematographer Tak Fujimoto, here paying homage to Gordon "The Prince of Darkness" Willis, deserves better. On the "plus" side, detail is such that you can still make out the knot that dominates Ryan Phillippe's forehead for the first half of the picture. (To quote the great Nick Davis, "…did Reese whomp him with her Oscar on his way out the door?") Attendant Dolby Digital 5.1 audio is pretty tame by design; a mid-film shooting-range sequence packs a wallop mainly because what precedes it is so subdued, if perfectly intelligible. The disc's bread-and-butter is a fabulous feature-length yak-track on which director Billy Ray is joined, as he was on the Shattered Glass DVD, by the real-life subject of his docudrama, one Eric O'Neill. That they sound a lot alike can get confusing (especially because O'Neill often refers to the narrative with a producer's detachment, having developed the project himself), but it's a unique privilege to get a blow-by-blow account of what's true and what's Hollywood straight from the horse's mouth. Although Ray–who seems a lot more confident about his filmmaking skills this time around, citing numerous homages to '70s cinema–took one whopper of a liberty early on (O'Neill knew that Robert Hanssen was a double-agent going in), his rationale is sound, and what you wind up being shocked by is the film's fidelity to the facts.
Ray also reveals that a couple of scenes were re-scripted and re-shot (by The Bourne Identity's DP Oliver Wood, marvellously mimicking Fujimoto's style), and in a rare show of humility, we get to see what the original, indeed-inferior versions looked like under a selection of "Alternate Scenes." These, like a 12-minute helping of "Deleted Scenes," come with optional commentary from Ray and editor Jeffrey Ford. I must say, I really mourn the loss of two classic Chris Cooper moments, one of which is the anticipated bookend to Hanssen's 'true or false' game with Hanssen in the hot seat. (The other is simply some much-welcome–but, alas, expendable–comic relief.) Less essential are the three featurettes, which only steal precious bits from a video transfer that frankly needs all the help it can get: "Breaching the Truth" (11 mins.) and "Anatomy of a Character" (7 mins.–and brought to you by Volkswagen!) are your standard making-of fluff, while the "Dateline NBC" report "The Mole" (19 mins.) feels a bit premature, having been filed only two weeks after Hanssen's arrest and thus before O'Neill's involvement came to light. Startup, non-anamorphic promos for Because I Said So, Dead Silence, HD-DVD, Talk to Me, and Hot Fuzz round out the platter. Here's hoping Cooper's devastating performance is recognized by the Academy next February.
111 minutes; PG-13; 1.87:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1, French DD 5.1; English SDH, French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Universal
*Also available in fullscreen.
