Breach

It's interesting that director Billy Ray has now made two films about a person living a lie: Shattered Glass, which was about a reporter making up stories and passing them off as factual; and Breach, about an FBI agent passing secrets to the Russians. In the grand scheme of things, the latter is the more serious offense, for lives and billions of dollars were at stake. Yet Shattered Glass is a far more engaging, suspenseful film than Breach.

Comparing the two films is probably unfair but inevitable, since they have the same director and a similar theme. In trying to understand why Breach is pallid in comparison, I think there are two reasons. One, the film begins with a news clip of John Ashcroft announcing the arrest of Robert Hanssen as a spy, so we know how this all will end. Perhaps Ray figured that enough people had heard about it when it happened (I certainly did), so there was no point in trying to hide the result. That's fair enough, because what we get is a fascinating character study of Hanssen, as essayed by Chris Cooper, who is an endlessly interesting actor. Hanssen is a pious Catholic and a rigorous taskmaster, the kind of patriot who makes it hard to understand why he did what he did. In a scene late in the film, an agent played by Dennis Haysbert just wants to know "Why?"

This has a deleterious effect on the film in that it pretty much removes all the suspense. At no time do we really sense in anyone in danger. There a few of those "will he switch the palm pilot before the guy gets back" scenes, which are kind of phony, the equivalent of the false scare in a horror picture. At the end of the film, I realized it was well crafted, but it really didn't add up to much.

Secondly, I have a serious problem with Ryan Phillipe. Frankly, I can't understand why he's as big a star as he is. He first made a splash playing a callow youth in the prep school version of Dangerous Liaisons, and I haven't shaken that impression of him. He plays an FBI employee who hopes to be an agent, and gets assigned an undercover job keeping an eye on Hanssen. He has to suck up to Hanssen while at the same time keeping everything a secret from his wife. Now, in Shattered Glass the character who figures everything out is played brilliantly by Peter Sarsgaard. In Breach, Phillipe is a dull tool. He doesn't really know anything, he is a pawn of the higher-ups, particularly Laura Linney as a hard-as-nails agent. She is far more interesting in her few scenes than Phillipe is in three times the screen time.