Breach (2007)

I've heard it said that the true makeup of a man is what he does when no one is looking and the film Breach illuminates that distinction between our private acts and our public acts to great effect. The story of Breach is an intriguing one. It is the true life story about a novice FBI agent assigned to help uncover the workings behind the greatest and most damaging traitor and spy in American history.

Ryan Phillippe plays Eric O'Neill, the young and hungry FBI agent and Chris Cooper brilliantly portrays legendary spy Robert Hanssen, who's double-life caught everyone by surprise. Hanssen was a walking dichotomy of morality. He was both a very devout Roman Catholic who avoided occasions of sin while, at the same time, providing information to the Russians that he knew would cause the death of many double-agents.

I have found, in my life, that the more I understand my faith, Catholicism, the farther away from Heaven I get. It's the difference between being a good person and being a holy person. It's not that I won't make it to Heaven, or that I can't make it, or that my faith is keeping me from it... it is that the more I understand what is required, the more I understand what being holy means and what is expected from me through my faith, the more I realize how incapable I am of getting there on my own. After all, how can an imperfect being reach perfection without assistance from the perfectly divine?

O'Neill and Hanssen in church.

It's this reliance on faith, propelled by his own sin, that Cooper so effectively shows in Breach. The man is in a constant state of various levels of agony. The film subtly shows his devout faith as a requirement, a balancing act, because of his moral flaws driven by arrogance and pride are causing him to commit mortal sins against the very God he worshiped. I never sensed Hanssen's faith was fake, or put on for show, but instead the moral weight on the scales of his soul that kept him from falling forever into a self-created hellish abyss.


Other wonderful actors, such as Laura Linney, Gary Cole and Dennis Haysbert round out the cast, but it is the weighted, struggled and tortured performance by Cooper that takes this spy film to an entirely different level.

Breach brings one of the darkest moments in U.S. intelligence history to the screen with a multi-layered, effectively moving and intriguing film filled with at least one Academy Award worthy performance.