Movies: Breach

While based on a true story, Breach makes its most honest achievement in disillusion: unlike Hollywood's FBI, the United States' FBI offers few adventures, few thrills, few heroes, and much bureaucratic tedium. Yes, that is a grandiose way of saying that this movie is a complete disappointment.

The story has potential. Young whippersnapper Eric O'Neill (Ryan Phillipe) finds himself assigned to clerk for the crusty, Catholic Robert Hanssen (Chris Cooper). What Hanssen doesn't know, but seems to always suspect, is the O'Neill has actually been assigned (by Kate Burroughs, competently if plainly played by Laura Linney) to "keep an eye" on him, and provide the Bureau with detailed summaries of every move he makes. What O'Neill doesn't know (until about half way through the movie) is that he's not been assigned to babysit a (mere) sexual deviant, as he was originally told, but to babysit the biggest seller of secrets in FBI history, and to assist the Bureau in catching him red handed. It's not much in the way of plot twists, and all we get along the way is some (very thin) character development: O'Neill has a lovely young wife, Juliana (Caroline Dhavernas) who doesn't like to go to church.

A comparison to The Departed is inevitable. Not because it won Best Picture, and not because I liked it so much I saw it twice in the theatre, but because it works the same plot/character structure, and does so with much more efficacy. That structure, of course, is the following: precocious young man (Phillipe, DiCaprio, Damon) is pushed to act as a double-agent, spying on the senior member of some agency (Cooper, Nicholson, Sheen), and oddly comes to respect that person, but still must bring that person down. Much psychological machinations ensue. . . Well, in The Departed much psychological machinations ensue. In Breach, a bit of fluffy discussion of faith ensues, along with an awkward trip to church for Phillipe and his young wife with the Boss and his own saintly wife, Bonnie (Kathleen Quinlan).

Suddenly, and seemingly from nowhere, the tough spy who's spent the past 20 years selling secrets to Russia cracks up over some glitchy sounds coming from his car stereo, shows up drunk at the whippersnapper's house, and takes him out to the snowy woods where he screams, cries, and shoots a gun at his subordinate. After coming home from this daunting episode, the subordinate has another fight with his young wife about his job, shouts at her, and storms away. Neither of these emotional breakdowns are warranted by anything that has happened in the film thus far. The good news is that the whippersnapper is able to use his reading of the crusty spy's psyche (the man desperately wants to be important) to goad him into making a final "drop" of secrets. The FBI arrests Hanssen, and O'Neill goes home, kisses his wife, and, just as easily as their marriage was spoiled, it is made whole again by that kiss. Right.

Let it not be held against Cooper that this film is no good. His performance is excellent, and the screenwriter seems to be in cahoots, giving him all the best lines: a melange of the racist, sexist, and generally elitist epithets we have come to expect from anyone working in military and/or intelligence. Phillipe, however, is like a doe (yes, a doe - no young buck is he) caught in the set's tungsten lights. In The Departed, Damon morphs into a drowning self-preservation machine and DiCaprio trembles like the last leaf on a November tree branch. This is psychological depth, Ryan Phillipe. Watch and learn. You can't turn in a Cruel Intentions performance for a film like this. Your ineptitude was marginally forgivable in Crash, when you portrayed doe-in-the-headlights ineptitude personified, but it won't cut it much longer.