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Trailer for "Breach"

The double agent is a staple of espionage lore, fact and fiction. The Good Shepherd, Robert DeNiro’s recent dour, reticent and obscure film was partly inspired by the CIA’s James J. Angleton, who spent many years in an obsessive and fruitless search for a Soviet plant in the agency, as he overlooked the actual “mole.”

Billy Ray’s Breach provides an often compelling portrait of an actual American traitor in the FBI’s counterintelligence service. Over a 20-year period before he was apprehended in 2001, Robert Hanssen sold vital secrets, first to the Soviet Union and then to Russia. It’s said that Hanssen was the most successful, and most damaging, traitor in American history. He was paid $1.4 million for his extensive efforts.

The film may be mostly accurate in its depiction of Hanssen; much of it has a feel of perverse truth. It offers up a man who is initially abrasively eccentric and soon becomes an intriguing puzzle, and even, incongruously, almost sympathetic, despite our resistance to him.

The filmmakers (Ray co-wrote the script with Adam Mazer and William Rotko) don’t arrive at an explanation of Hanssen’s conduct or character, and that would be too much to expect of a mere movie. They do seem to suggest that he may have been partly motivated by a deep resentment at being too often ignored or dismissed as unessential by the bureau over the quarter-century of his service. This hypothesis isn’t without its problematic aspect: Hanssen began his for-profit betrayal only five years after he began working in counterintelligence, but this is another example of the difficulties in understanding him.

The film’s primary success is in conveying the warped intelligence, the involuted anger and embittered perversities of the man. The largest measure of that success comes from Chris Cooper’s performance. His Hanssen is some kind of supremely proficient, often perceptive but nevertheless primitive man. Hanssen was a deeply reactionary, right-wing Catholic, not so quietly at odds with much of cultural modernity. On top of that, he was sexually driven but sharply conflicted and morally hypocritical.

Cooper’s achievement is in rendering this slightly dotty individual as recognizably human. His reactions range impressively from arrogantly overbearing to peevish intolerance at life in and beyond the bureau, on to rueful reflection. Even a fleeting shot of Hanssen barely registering his contempt at a “faggot” photographer’s suggestion of makeup during a portrait sitting is all too convincing.

Where the film sometimes goes wrong is in its version of the events leading up to Hanssen’s apprehension. The FBI sent a young software ace, Eric O’Neill (Ryan Phillippe), to spy on the spy, and as it’s portrayed here, a conflict-fraught tortured respect for his prey began to develop in the young man, perhaps fueled somewhat by post-Catholic guilt. All well and good, but in the film’s version, O’Neill’s relations with his alienated, suspicious wife (Caroline Dhavernas) come off too much like daytime TV drama, particularly when she protests his secrecy and even pries into those secrets. The real O’Neill was a consultant to the filmmakers but these scenes still feel amped up and contrived.

More importantly, so does some of the material intended to increase the tension. Part of the problem may be in Phillippe’s performance but a lot of the blame is Ray’s. His film doesn’t really justify having the perhaps slightly paranoid, hyper-cautious Hanssen falling for some of O’Neill’s manipulative excuses for troubling screw-ups at critical junctures. The level of implausibility goes up, whatever the truth about what happened.

Ray’s depiction of the FBI as a bleakly industrial and bureaucratic security conglomerate, a vast grey combination of routinized behaviors and swaggering supercop culture is tellingly effective. And it makes it easier to maintain an interest in the film’s proceedings if you’re not a fan of the bureau’s often dubious role in American life. (The skeptical tone of the film’s take on the agency is offset chiefly by the soft light in which the selfless senior agent “running” O’Neill (Laura Linney) is presented.)

There are very few occasions in which a leading actor really validates a movie, overrides its weaknesses. Cooper comes about as close as anyone I can recall. Breach is more his movie than anyone else’s.