In the past five years, plenty of films have been made dealing with the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and their aftereffects, both directly and indirectly. But Billy Ray's ""Breach"" is the first film to depict, with a palpable level of historical perspective, what the immediate pre-9/11 world was like.
Set in the FBI headquarters during the disorienting months following the chaotic 2000 election—we see portraits of Bill Clinton and Janet Reno replaced with ones of George W. Bush and John Ashcroft—""Breach"" makes it clear we are watching a still-dangerous, but very different, U.S. intelligence community.
""Do you have a FISA warrant?"" Eric O'Neill (Ryan Phillippe), the young operative assigned to spy on another agent, asks his superior, Kate Burroughs (Laura Linney). ""Of course,"" she snaps back, unknowing of how relevant Bush will soon make the question.
O'Neill is assigned to spy on Agent Robert Hanssen (Chris Cooper) using the cover of being Hanssen's new assistant. Hanssen, Burroughs explains, is one of the Bureau's most accomplished counter-Soviet agents, a genius with computers and unfortunately, an online sexual deviant. O'Neill's assignment is to catch him in the act.
Hanssen is a devout and conservative Catholic who attends church every day, disapproves of women wearing pants (""The world doesn't need any more Hillary Clintons"") and declares that the U.S.S.R. would have won the Cold War if not for their ""godlessness."" O'Neill can't find a shred of evidence of his supposed sexual offenses, and, like the audience, can't fathom how this man could ever be capable of such a thing. He rightly suspects he's in the middle of something larger, and eventually Burroughs admits that Hanssen is accused of something even more unfathomable: spying for the Soviet Union and Russia.
Burroughs makes it clear that Hanssen's guilt is not in question—O'Neill's job is to find enough evidence to establish a bulletproof legal case against him. By skillfully making the story's ""mystery"" not much of one at all, ""Breach"" becomes much less about the facts of the case and more about the confoundingly fascinating psychology of its primary character. After telling O'Neill the God-fearing, blue-blooded Hanssen is a Communist double agent, she adds, though irrelevantly, the sexual accusations happen to be true, too. The only thing clear about Hanssen is that nothing is.
So, why did he do it? To its credit, the film doesn't pretend to know (although it does present a few theories). It seems likely the real Hanssen, who is currently serving a life sentence at ADX Florence, probably doesn't really know, either.
""Breach"" also touches on a theme explored just a few months ago (on a less intimate, more epic scale) in ""The Good Shepherd"": given the espionage happening on both sides, is there really any point?
The Cold War might not have ended any differently, both films suggest, had legions of people on both sides not given their lives to play a deadly game of cat and mouse—not with outliers like Robert Hanssen equalizing things, anyway. The true story dramatized in ""Breach"" makes for a tragically fitting final chapter to an era of global conflict that may have technically ended in 1989, but wasn't truly, and just as sadly, replaced until 2001.
