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This film by Billy Ray (Shattered Glass) tells this remarkable story of how Hanssen was eventually exposed and how the F.B.I. worked over the final two months of his employment at the agency to try and infiltrate his circle and make a case using all their available resources at the highest level of the bureau. On February 20, 2001, FBI agent Robert Hanssen was arrested by an agency task force and charged with selling the highest and most classified of the government's secrets to the Soviet Union. His case would later identify him as the biggest spy in American history who's sharing of sensitive documents and information lead to the death of at least three operatives while exposing some of the nation's highest confidential secrets and operations. Chris Cooper (Adaptation) plays Hanssen. He is a church going family man that at first hardly mirrors the monster that the agency is determined to expose. Ryan Phillippe (Crash) plays Eric O'Neill, an agent wannabe that is assigned to work as Henssen's clerk in an attempt to follow, document & spy on his move in an attempt to help the F.B.I. build their case. Their relationship for two months will lead to the downfall of Hanssen's operations and would leave a black mark on the government agencies in a year that presented its own problems by 9/11. The film is less concerned with big action scenes than with examining the relationship between these 2 very different men set in unwitting opposition to one another. Hanssen himself was a mass of immense hypocrisies & contradictions. As a devout Catholic, he attends Mass religiously, recites the rosary everyday, and looks with disdain upon homosexuals, women who wear pants & anybody seemingly to the left politically of extreme conservatism. Yet, despite his outward display of moral rectitude, Hanssen secretly distributes porn videos of his wife (she is unaware of their existence) and betrays his country by turning over classified information to the enemy. O'Neill finds himself simultaneously drawn to & repulsed by the man, who manages to be both prig and libertine at one and the same time. O'Neill knows that what Hanssen is doing is terribly wrong, yet he can't help falling under the spell of a man he knows that, under other circumstances, might well come to value as a friend & a mentor. In July of the same year, Hanssen was tried and convicted for 15 counts of espionage. Followers of the Robert Hanssen case believe that Hanssen's primary motive was to show his own importance (as a information security planner) by revealing holes in the system that he would have plugged. I wish this film would have worked with that a bit, because this notion of helping the system by hurting is system is both what the story could have been about and the means used to tell the story. A news documentary which ran on Dateline on 3/5/2001 outlined the way Robert Hanssen communicated his information to re-establish new protocol to pass information over 6000 pages of documents/data that was worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Great roles were delivered as well by Laura Linney, Gary Cole, Dennis Haysbert, Kathleen Quinlan, & Tom Barnett to name a few. Interesting trivia: In the opening, code quickly flashes & is reduced to the movie title. The scrolling code is a Linux procedure that mounts (connects to) networked data sources such as Unix, Windows and Novell file systems. The real Hanssen commonly used a quote about purple pissin' japanese which led to his capture.Read full review
If you like movies made for thinking adults who do not need explosions every 10 seconds then this is the movie for you. Jekyll-and-Hide Robert Hanssen (Chris Cooper) is the spy who does not let his guard down to anybody. The FBI sends in a young agent to be the FBI's eyes and ears building a case against Hanssen. Chris Cooper gives a dramatic performace, blending into the character of deep religious, sexual pervert, who betrays his country.
Watch this movie (Breach). I realize HD-DVD is considered dead technology. Fine; buy another format, but do watch it. You may or may not typically get excited for this genre, but the actors outdid themselves in this film and the film's architects' vision and design really sell this picture. Suspense is this movie's middle name. Prepare to be impressed.
Very good movie. Not an action film by any account, but you can't beat Chris Cooper in this performance. Lots of drama in this spy story about admiration, morality, and duty to country.
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