O’Neill’s struggle to do his job when he feels a certain loyalty to Hanssen is especially interesting. Breach is the opposite – tight, compact, tense, and gray AF. Ten years later, we seem to flip out over films with striking cinematography that are otherwise uninspired – like Blade Runner 2049, which just flopped around for three hours in a sea of pretty colors. The only change of decoration occurs when a new president’s and attorney general’s portrait is hung on the wall.
The FBI interiors are soul-suckingly nondescript. Washington – so beautiful and picturesque in the springtime with its endless sea of cherry blossoms – is, in the wintertime, a wash of intimidating white buildings. That’s not to say its morals are conflicted – though they are – but rather everything in the film is gray and dulled. It’s a powerful moment in a complicated, well-told story that’s probably forgotten because it lacks a certain cinematic touch, but that’s pretty clearly by Ray’s design.īreach might be the grayest film of this century. The former reports to Laura Linney, in an underwritten role, who eventually shares with him the truth. His sexual misbehavior is the pretense under which O’Neill is meant to surveil Hanssen. Not exactly Trump’s style, but we know that President Pussygrabber has some, let’s say interesting, proclivities himself. In addition to betraying his country, he posted sex stories about his wife on the internet without her knowledge and at least once (per the film) mailed someone a sex tape of him with his wife – Some weird sex shit helped bring Hanssen down. There are some similarities between the cases, however. Gone are the days, it seems, when those working with Russia did so in the shadows. “Collusion” with Russia by a candidate for the American presidency and his campaign has been one of the biggest scandals in American history. Watching his film, Breach, and reliving this story in the middle of the Trump presidency is a trip.
In January 2007, writer-director Billy Ray shared his fictionalized and cinematic version of these events with Chris Cooper in the Hanssen role and Ryan Phillippe playing Eric O’Neill, the ambitious intelligence analyst who suddenly found himself involved in the greatest case in FBI history. In February 2001, American politicians of all ideological persuasions came together and acknowledged the great work done by the nation’s intelligence agencies in bringing down Robert Hanssen, a high-ranking agent himself who sold secrets to agents of the Soviet Union and Russia for nearly two decades. All films will be discussed in the context of their release, as well as their cultural relevance today, and at the end of each post, a film will be given a verdict of “unfairly forgotten,” “exactly the correct amount of forgotten,” or “appropriate forgotten.”
#Breach 2007 series
The Forgaughtens is a series of posts in which I revisit “forgotten” films that were released between the years 20, or the aughts. Posted on JanuBy John Gilpatrick 2000s, Classic Reviews, The Forgaughtens
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