Breach depicts the hunt for a strange spy in the FBI, writes Michael Dwyer
Writer-director Billy Ray set himself a challenge from the outset of Breach by giving away the ending. Newsreel footage from February 2001 shows the US attorney-general, John Ashcroft, commenting about the arrest of FBI counter-intelligence agent Robert Hanssen on espionage charges. Cue a flashback to two months earlier.
Ray made an auspicious directing debut with another factually based story of elaborate deception, Shattered Glass (2003), starring Hayden Christensen as an ambitious New Republic journalist whose fabrication of stories was uncovered and exposed by a close colleague.
Breach follows a similar narrative arc when a young FBI trainee agent, Eric O'Neill (Ryan Phillippe), is assigned to be planted as a mole to monitor Hanssen (Chris Cooper), a senior agent who has been with the bureau for 25 years. What follows is, on one level, a tense cat-and-mouse chase in which the prey is older and wiser - and thereby more dangerous - than his pursuer.
The film is equally effective as a character study of Hanssen, who is steeped in contradictions. He projects the image of a dedicated family man and a fervent convert to Catholicism. He keeps his catechism on his desk and, when we first see him, he is in church, saying the Rosary. "I don't approve of women in pantsuits," Hanssen tells his young apprentice. "They're for men. The world has had enough Hillary Clintons."
Yet O'Neill's FBI liaison officer (Laura Linney) claims that Hanssen is a sexual deviant and the subject of harassment complaints made by women at the bureau. And Hanssen openly expresses his avid enthusiasm for Catherine Zeta-Jones.
O'Neill reinvents himself chameleon-like to achieve the approval and confidence of Hanssen. It helps that the young agent is Catholic, Jesuit-educated and happily married. O'Neill's assignment has to be kept so secret that his increasingly erratic behaviour inevitably strains his relationship with his German wife (Caroline Dhavernas).
As Hanssen casually informs O'Neill that there is a search for a spy inside the FBI, Breach embarks on to another level, to explore and try to understand why a man who has given his life's work to the bureau would be so willing to betray his colleagues and his country. The film extends its brief to deal with O'Neill's dilemma as he prepares to betray his surrogate father figure.
Ray treats this fascinating, multi-layered story in the manner of a detective procedural drama, gradually peeling away Hanssen's mask. The refreshingly unhurried pace quickens when necessary, in several grippingly staged situations when O'Neill's own mask threatens to fall.
Hanssen was first played on screen by William Hurt in the 2002 TV movie Master Spy: The Robert Hanssen Story, which was written by Norman Mailer. Ray had the advantage of O'Neill's services as a consultant on this production, and it feels authentic in every detail, from the blandly designed FBI offices and wintry Washington locations to the sheer urgency building on both sides of the investigation as resolution looms. In that respect, Ray achieves what Alan J Pakula did in All the President's Men: he takes a story where the ending is known from the beginning and infuses it with palpable tension throughout.
Breach benefits immeasurably from the quality of its exemplary cast, in which Cooper oozes steely gravitas for his richest, most complex performance to date, and Phillippe perfectly catches O'Neill in all his youthful determination and anxieties.
