A Film Canon

Breach describes the last days of Robert Hanssen (Chris Cooper), the FBI agent responsible for one of the most drastic intelligence disasters in US history. Although Hanssen was apprehended in 2001, he had been a member of the FBI since 1976, and feeding information to Russia and the Soviet Union since 1979. As a result, the film plays as an extension of the 70s paranoia mode, gradually edging the period signifiers closer and closer to the present, albeit in a sufficiently subliminal way to ensure that the presence of the present becomes a kind of sustained twist, a continual source of surprise, incredulity and incongruity. This is largely because Billy Ray periodises the ambit of Hanssen's career in terms of a gradual dissociation of historical and technological time, such that 2001 comes to feel more remote, in some ways, than the 70s, just as an early DVD of Entrapment that's bandied about feels more retrotronic than the actual release of the film. It's easy to see, then, why Cooper's part and performance were criticised for not addressing Hanssen's inconsistencies - or, alternatively, praised for dissolving those inconsistencies in banality - since Ray ultimately seems more interested in incommensurability than inconsistency, following Hanssen along two incommensurate timelines that allow the film to occupy far more of his life than it apparently does. In its own quiet way, it's one of the most compelling moments in Cooper's career, as sombre and constrained as Ray's cibachromatic vision of Washington DC as all the lustres between copper and steel, a soft fall of blue frost.