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Breach's opening weekend came exactly five years after its real-life subject, FBI agent Robert Hanssen, was arrested for treason. That would have been reason enough for this agile thriller to debut in mid-February, but the season is also perfectly suited to the film's tone. This is a spy movie stripped of glamorous settings and escapist twists, based on a true cat-and-mouse tale that took place in Washington's gray winter. If there's sunlight at all in Breach, it only appears for a few seconds.
Any film that plays out largely inside a government-issue office building relies largely on the proper execution, and Billy Ray's workmanlike direction (he also co-wrote the screenplay with Adam Mazer and William Rotko) is a perfect fit. But it's Chris Cooper as Hanssen, and to a lesser extent Ryan Philippe as the budding agent tracking him, who make the movie stand out. The role is tailor-made for Cooper, whose down-home accent and almost effeminate scowl evoke a weird blend of propriety and creepiness. Hanssen appears straight-laced on the surface, yet in his touchy demeanor we sense a whisper of something monstrous. This is a film of our moment, or perhaps of our recent past, kicking off in late 2000 as the election debacle died out and the Bush administration prepared to take office. It's not by chance that images of pious, Constitution-shredding former Attorney General John Ashcroft appear twice in Breach. Philippe, who still looks like a boy from Provence who just realized why his Parisian girlfriend has stopped writing, is the perfect match for Cooper's raisin-faced Hanssen. He's a sensitive young man but not lacking in ambition, a devoted but not emasculated husband. Laura Linney and other familiar faces flesh out the cast, but Breach belongs to the two men uncomfortably thrown together in their windowless office suite.
Ray, who previously wrote the preposterous but frequently engaging Flightplan, benefits from being anchored to a true story. So does the spy genre, as it turns out. It's somehow more suspenseful to watch a character risk death when you know the outcome won't involve a car with an ejector seat. I could have watched another half hour of Breach, which flies by in 110 minutes. I could also have stood a bit more examination of Hanssen's character and motivations. Perhaps there's not enough known about those to better flesh out that part of the story. But every hint Breach delivers makes him a more fascinating chameleon, a malicious Jason Bourne of the suburbs. You may never look at an acoustic-tile ceiling the same way again.