Breach

I heard about the movie Breach on NPR when it came out on DVD in June and thought it would be a good movie to check out from the library. I guess it came out sometime this past spring, but since I never seem to watch live TV and hardly get to go the movie theatre, I didn't hear about it!

Breach is the true story of the capture of the worst traitor in US history, Robert Hanssen (Chris Cooper), in 2001. Hansseen had worked for the FBI for 25 years, but was also selling secrets to the Russians during the past 20 years. The story is told through the prospective of Eric O'Neil (Ryan Phillippe), a young agent in training, who helps to bring the man down. Although we know how the story is going to end, it is still riviting and nail bitting at times. Robert Hanssen is a pillar of the community, a devout Catholic, and very strait laced at work. Eric finds himself admiring the man. The perfect facade though hids a sexual deviant and traitor to his nation, whose motivation is not money, but to prove that he can do it. In other words, he wasn't such a good Catholic after all! Eric's life starts to unravel as Hanssen brings himself more into his personal life and wants Eric's wife to become Catholic. Eric can't tell his wife about the secret investigation and she gets fed up with the secrets and his overbearing boss.

Overall, it was a very good movie. I highly recommend it. It's a good suspense movie as well as a good way to learn a bit about modern U.S. history. I seemed to have missed this case in 2001. But then again, I was still at Michigan Tech and my daily news came from the Daily Mining Gazette, so it would have been easy to miss it!