Hanssen's Disease
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Hanssen's Disease Will we ever know why he betrayed his country? by John Podhoretz Breach, the excessively sober new movie about the FBI’s efforts to bring down the most damaging spy in...
...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...
...He was a sociopathic, wild animal who dressed himself up every day in a stuffed shirt to avoid detection...
...the more people bought into it...
...Hanssen comes across as a standardissue Hollywood clich?: the right-wing kook villain who is capable of anything because he’s so intolerant and insensitive and conservative...
...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...
...For another, the timeline of Breach makes the O’Neill personal crisis seem ridiculous...
...Director Billy Ray shows us Hanssen praying the rosary and weeping during confession...
...A young FBI counterintelligence 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 Hanssen’s activities at night...
...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...
...by John Podhoretz Breach, the excessively sober new movie about the FBI’s efforts to bring down the most damaging spy in American history, makes the same mistake about Robert Hanssen that so many of his colleagues at the FBI did over the course of his 25-year career...
...It never seems to have occurred to Ray and his coscreenwriters 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...
...In Breach, O’Neill spends exactly two months with Hanssen...
...In movies like Donnie Brasco and The Departed, the undercover guys literally spend years with the bad guys and grow fond of them...
...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...
...We see O’Neill enjoying a pleasant Sunday with Hanssen and his family, which makes him feel bad about busting the guy...
...Breach makes an implicit correlation between Hanssen’s unpleasant severity and the rigorous Catholic doctrine to which he subscribes...
...Hanssen laid it on so thick in part, it seems, because the more he seemed like a walking clich...
...Chris Cooper, who plays Hanssen, gives a performance that mostly seems confined to his pursed, quivering lips...
...His double act threatens his marriage and his emotional equilibrium...
...Breach is set in the months before Attorney General John Ashcroft announced Hanssen’s arrest in February 2001...
...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...
...It takes Hanssen at face value...
...But it’s a ludicrous stretch in this case...
...His last words to Eric O’Neill are “pray for me...
...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...
...In Breach, we get a lot of the stuffed shirt and none of the wild animal...
...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...
...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...
...In real life, Hanssen actually spoke on background to reporters in snarling terms about an infestation of “lesbians” inside the Justice Department...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...He says he disapproves of women in pants and insults Hillary Clinton...
...John Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic...
Vol. 12 • February 2007 • No. 24
