GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 2/14/07)

After making an intelligent and absorbing thriller out of a true-life case of journalistic malfeasance with 2004's Shattered Glass, writer/director Billy Ray turns to another torn-from-the-headlines story, this one set, as is more common for the thriller genre, in the world of spies and secrets. So it's interesting that Breach, its somewhat flashy trailers notwithstanding, is kind of low-wattage compared to Glass, let alone your average Tom Clancy adaptation. Perhaps that's due to Ray's concern with verisimilitude. After all, the story of F.B.I. veteran Robert Hanssen — who was revealed in 2001 as having been perhaps the most destructive mole in U.S. history — is pretty well-known. You probably couldn't really get away with injecting a subplot featuring a dirty bomb into the scenario to spice it up. So there's that.

But I also think that Ray is also more concerned with the character drama of the story than with its suspense angles. The question for Phillipe's character, a wannabe agent who's assigned to pretend to be Hanssen's aide while digging for evidence of Hanssen's espionage, is: How much wrong are you willing and able to do in order to uncover somebody else's wrongdoing? And this is what really animates Breach, more than any desire to nail down the perverse contradictions of Hanssen's own character.

The movie, scripted by Ray with Adam Mazer, explores the question in ways that are often fascinating but sometimes frustrating. Phillippe's character feels underwritten (his real-life counterpart did participate in the preparation of the film), which, given the movie's choice not to try to over-explain Hanssen, leads to some blank passages. But the procedural aspects of the story are briskly done, and Chris Cooper's portrayal of the traitor Hanssen is a typically Cooperesque marvel. While this isn't as good as The Lives of Others, it is nice to see two espionage pictures that actually have something on their minds released in the same month.

— Glenn Kenny