Hanssen’s Disease

Breach is set in the months before Attorney General John Ash croft announced Hans sen’s arrest in February 2001. A young FBI counter intelligence officer named Eric O’Neill (the very dull Ryan Phillippe) is told the bureau wants to build a case against computer expert Hanssen for his sexual deviancy, and he is assigned to work as Hanssen’s assistant during the day and write a report on Hans sen’s activities at night.

O’Neill instantly learns that Hanssen is a rude, ugly-tempered man whose dislike and distrust of his young charge are only leavened when he learns O’Neill is a fellow computer aficionado and a fellow Catholic. (Chris Cooper, who plays Hanssen, gives a performance that mostly seems confined to his pursed, quivering lips.) Hanssen speaks bitterly about the bureau and its shortcomings, and O’Neill begins to get the sense that he has been recruited to run this maverick out of town for no good reason. At this point, O’Neill’s superiors let him in on the truth: Hanssen has betrayed innumerable secrets to the Soviets and the Russians and sent at least three American agents in Moscow to their deaths.

The Eric O’Neill we see in Breach suffers a terrible crisis of conscience as he works to bring Hanssen down. His double act threatens his marriage and his emotional equilibrium. We see O’Neill enjoying a pleasant Sunday with Hanssen and his family, which makes him feel bad about busting the guy. We see the investigation take a terrible toll on O’Neill’s marriage, as his comely wife yells at him about the lying and deceit he is inflicting on her.

This plot–the dilemma of the undercover officer who must betray the people with whom he has become intimate and who puts his family at risk–is very familiar movie territory. But it’s a ludicrous stretch in this case. For one thing, in interviews, the real-life Eric O’Neill evinces absolutely no sense of torment or misgiving about his role in Hanssen’s downfall, which was clearly a very exciting and rewarding time in his life–as indeed it should have been.

For another, the timeline of Breach makes the O’Neill personal crisis seem ridiculous. In movies like Donnie Brasco and The Departed, the undercover guys literally spend years with the bad guys and grow fond of them. In Breach, O’Neill spends exactly two months with Hanssen. And since Hanssen is an almost unmitigatedly awful person, even when he’s trying to be pleasant, it’s hard to buy into O’Neill’s deep conflict. Whenever Hanssen starts insulting O’Neill, which is often, you want the kid to take out a bureau-issued gun and shoot his boss between the eyes–not because he’s a spy, but because he’s such a colossal jerk.

Breach makes an implicit correlation between Hanssen’s unpleasant severity and the rigorous Catholic doctrine to which he subscribes. Director Billy Ray shows us Hanssen praying the rosary and weeping during confession. His last words to Eric O’Neill are “pray for me.” He says he disapproves of women in pants and insults Hillary Clinton. (In real life, Hanssen actually spoke on background to reporters in snarling terms about an infestation of “lesbians” inside the Justice Department.)

Hanssen comes across as a standard-issue Hollywood cliché: the right-wing kook villain who is capable of anything because he’s so intolerant and insensitive and conservative. It never seems to have occurred to Ray and his co-screenwriters Adam Mazer and William Rotko that everything Hanssen said and did, including his professed Opus Dei Catholicism, was a consciously designed smokescreen–a “legend,” in spy parlance–that kept him hidden in plain sight for 25 years. Hanssen laid it on so thick in part, it seems, because the more he seemed like a walking cliché the more people bought into it.

Following his arrest in 2001, Hanssen told the FBI that he was “addicted” to espionage, which indicates he took a deep sensual pleasure in the act of betraying his country. The same was clearly true of his surreptitious sexual habits, which included making videotapes of rough sex between him and his wife that he then shared with at least one close friend. He was a sociopathic, wild animal who dressed himself up every day in a stuffed shirt to avoid detection.

In Breach, we get a lot of the stuffed shirt and none of the wild animal. Which is fitting, actually, because as a moviegoing experience, Breach is as tightly wound and inflexible as the Robert Hanssen it depicts–a Robert Hanssen who, six years after his arrest, continues to work a successful con on people all too willing to believe that his cover story is the real thing.

John Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.