AniInterview
Sorry, this movie sucks
Acensbart
Excellent but underrated film
Fleur
Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.
chaos-rampant
One more attempt by a spy film to capture something of the machinations that move our modern world, the contradictions at the heart of it that keep it dissembled and ambiguous. It's why I seek these things out, apart of course from the thrill of secret lives and manipulable narratives. We can feel our own lives to have a kind of secret agency, well some days we might, it's what in older times people identified as fate.Bond and sundry capers give us a world powered by duplicitous forces but an action hero plows through it. Everything eventually makes clear and simple sense, good and evil kept on different tabs. The narrative threads plucked from the motives of characters are childlike; world domination and averting it.This is a step up from that. We're told that this cranky old agent of 30 years may be working for the other side. The film is a portrait of this man at the center of duplicitous narratives, a narrator used to tweaking truth. Over the course of things we come to understand that a man has his reasons, reasons that go beyond simple right and wrong are are entangled with a whole self. We understand the disillusionment to be woven with the place he worked.It's touted as a mature look overall, above silly histrionics. But it's still a portrait and feels, like all portraits, the result of something posed for. It's a romanticized portrayal to boot, compared to the real person, serving us the tacit archetype of the stern American patriarch who glares and snarls and is set in his ragged ways that the world has no more use for. Cooper is great but I miss the abstract swim of a more pervasive uncertainty, a work that doesn't just prop up and define a type.And I spent some time last summer, boring time, with a CIA paper on counter intelligence from Reagan's day, originally released as a series of internal memos and later compiled in a book. Written in the bureaucratic language of university psychology, it was aimed to instruct square military types like the guy Cooper plays here, with their old boy attitude of knowing best because they've been around, on the difficulties of making sense and precisely how observation is perturbed by the viewer. It was a boring read that zapped vital ideas of their seductiveness and another instance of how state agencies guiding the lives of millions often work from outmoded blueprints. You'll see the latest iteration of this in the Iraqi failure. But the real insight for me was that an all powerful agency tasked with making (and constructing) sense had to be instructed as recently as yesteryear on how it's a multitudinous thing. The original impetus for the paper incidentally was a high ranking KGB defector and the tangled narrative web of whether or not he was a double agent.And all of this cuts for me at the heart of how we make sense as viewers in both life and the cinema. Our dogged insistence to make clear sense, to fit people into types and fashion stories in dramatically neat archs about what motivates them, papers over a fundamentally uncertain world where self will heave and elude in turbulent ways.
LeonLouisRicci
Low-Key, Matter of "Fact", and Extremely Subtle Telling of the Last Days of FBI Traitor Robert Hanssen with Chris Cooper Giving a Riveting, Universally Praised Performance in Director Billy Ray's Followup to the Underrated and Equally Good "Shattered Glass" (2003).Ryan Phillippe and Laura Linney Add Support but it is Cooper's Film Hand's Down. He Manages to Chill and Attract Sympathy for a Manipulative and Hypocritical Turncoat that Sold Out His Country on Misguided Principles, the Money was Secondary.The Real Soviet Expert and FBI Spy was a Mentally Disturbed Individual No Doubt and Cooper Brings that Dementia to the Screen with a Stare that Disarms. Eric O'Neill the Newly Assigned Clerk Sent in to Keep a Watch on Hanssen, is Played by Philippe as a Naive Newbie Who Learns Quickly (he must for survival) What it Takes to Steer the Always On Guard Advisory and it Mainly Involves Family and Religion.Overall, This is an Insider's Account of an Internal Investigation and it May Seem Dry at Times with Virtually No Action, but Suspenseful and Mysterious. It's the Characters and Dialog that Move the Movie and in That Regard it is Compelling and Never Boring.Note...Robert Hanssen made much of the "Turf Wars" and lack of inter-agency cooperation throughout his career. This proved prophetic in that was considered one of the main reasons for the failure of America's Intelligence Agencies to foresee the 9-11 attacks.
juneebuggy
This was pretty good for such a dry, slow-burning movie, it drags at times but still manages to keep a level of tension and suspense going throughout and I id end up really enjoying this. Ultimately it was the strong performances from both Chris Cooper and Ryan Phillippe that saved this for me.Cooper is intense and creepy here displaying a range of mystique. Laura Linney as his handler was quite bitchy. Ryan plays an FBI Trainee who is assigned to keep en eye on a fellow agent suspected of selling information to the soviets. Its his first real case and initially he's not even sure what he's looking for. 7/17/14
secondtake
Breach (2007)The big arc here is the uncovering of a spy within the FBI, based on a true story. And that's interesting. But the movie works because of the mental and emotional sparring between the two leads. First is the spy, Robert Hanssen, played brilliantly by Chris Cooper. He pulls off the brilliance and eccentricity you might get with this kind of person, and all without stagy exaggeration. This is a spy and a spy story worthy of John Le Carre.Next to him is the young FBI worker, not yet an agent, Eric O'Neill, played by Ryan Phillippe. He's excellent enough to support Cooper, for sure, though he (maybe by necessity) is a more bland type. His struggle with why he (of all the FBI people possible) has been given the huge job of bringing this other man down is key to his depth.Both men have wives, and both women are good—Hanssen's wife is played by Kathleen Quinlan and though we don't see her much, she's really good. And generally the cast supports this chilling, dry, steady intrigue. In other ways, the movie is a bit conventional—professionally made, you might say, but without stylistic distinction. It's no breakthrough masterpiece. But what it tries to do telling this story it does with spare, direct force. This is no adventure tale —there is no real action. But that's good. It's compelling and interesting.Since this is "history" or "based on truth" it's worth saying that only the large facts are followed. All the fun movie stuff—the meeting of the wives, the pistol shooting in two scenes, the sex stuff, and so on—are all invented. Apparently life is either too dull or too dangerous to really put on film.But that's okay. It's a strong story. And Cooper steals the day.
