Entertainment, Movies - Marine Corps Times

Missing pieces

The way “Breach” tells it, by the time FBI Agent Robert Hanssen was arrested in 2001, he had done more damage to the U.S. in his many years of spying for the Russians than any other traitor in American history — countless priceless secrets sold and at least 50 contacts and operatives compromised.

Yet because virtually all the damage wrought by Hanssen (Chris Cooper) remains highly classified, director Billy Ray and writers Adam Mazer and William Rotko have a problem that they can’t completely overcome: a spy thriller without much spycraft, and without many thrills, either.

In fact, the only overt “spy” scene comes at the tail end of the film, when Hanssen makes a “dead drop” of classified material just before his rather underwhelming arrest.

As such, the filmmakers are stuck making the best of what essentially is a character study. In that sense, they’re lucky they got the highly underrated Cooper to be their main man.

Cooper, who built a solid career on memorable small turns in bigger movies before winning an Oscar for best supporting actor in 2003 for “Adaptation,” doesn’t much resemble the real Hanssen.

But he has the facial features to play a traitorous superspy: squinty eyes that go flinty and distrustful in a nanosecond and a downturned mouth that radiates taciturn distaste when he’s ticked off — which, according to this script, is about every 10 minutes.

The movie covers only a brief time span, the few months before Hanssen’s arrest. As the story opens, the former head of the FBI’s Soviet analytical office is returning from several years as a State Department liaison, ostensibly to update the bureau’s information technology systems.

Agent Kate Burroughs (Laura Linney) tells young agent wannabe Eric O’Neill (Ryan Phillippe) that he is being assigned as Hanssen’s assistant and is to report to her regularly on his activities. When O’Neill asks why, she tells him Hanssen is a sexual pervert and the FBI is making a case against him.

As O’Neill settles into his new job, he finds this hard to believe. From all outward appearances, Hanssen is a solid family man who doesn’t drink or smoke and goes to Mass every day.

O’Neill, who eventually comes to admire his boss, finally loses patience with what he views as an FBI railroad job. Burroughs then drops the bomb, revealing that Hanssen has sold his nation down the river and the whole IT overhaul is a sham to keep him close as the bureau tries to make a last-ditch attempt to nail him.

Oh, and the pervert thing? That’s real, too — Hanssen likes to film himself having rough sex with his wife (Kathleen Quinlan) without her knowledge and then share the tapes with friends.

From here, the film becomes an intricate and dangerous dance as O’Neill struggles to stay cool and carry out his mission, to include keeping Hanssen busy as his office and car are searched, while his boss gets increasingly jittery and suspicious.

Cooper does a fine job creating quirky traits that flesh out his character in small, telling ways. And Phillippe, despite looking like he exited puberty just last week, holds his own.

The acting is good enough, in fact, to make the film consistently watchable. But there’s no getting past the missing pieces — not only the scant detail about the impact of Hanssen’s treachery, but also the fuzziness about his motivations, which apparently went well beyond simple greed.

“Breach” leaves the impression that even Hanssen may not have been entirely sure about why he did what he did — an enigma to the end, perhaps even to himself.

But he has lots of time to sort it out. As a closing-credits note tells us, he’s doing a life term with no chance of parole in a “supermax” federal prison in Colorado, where he spends 23 hours a day in solitary confinement.

2 ½ stars. Rated PG-13 for language, some sexual content.