At one point in Breach, Billy Ray’s riveting tale of
the capture of the FBI’s Russian mole, Robert Hanssen, the hero,
Eric O’Neill (Ryan Phillippe), confides in his superior officer,
Agent Burroughs (Laura Linney), about his marital problems. “I
would offer you some advice,” she tells him, “but it wouldn’t be
much good. I don’t even have a cat.”
He replies by asking her: “Is it worth it? Being an agent? Is it
worth what it costs?”
She smiles wanly. “Ask me when we’ve caught him.”
“Him,” of course, is Hanssen (Chris Cooper), and they do catch
him, as you will know from having read the papers six years ago.
But when they do, neither Mr. O’Neill nor the film asks her again
if it has been worth the price they pay in loneliness and broken
relationships. The implicit answer is no — as it also is
(apparently) of the real-life Eric O’Neill. It’s not worth it. Is
this a fact of any relevance to understanding why Hanssen did it in
the first place? The question appears not to interest Mr. Ray, who
directed, or Adam Mazer or William Rotko, with whom he wrote the
screenplay. Agent Burroughs says to young Eric, “So you’ve just
caught the worst spy in American history and now you’re going to
walk away?”
“Can you think of a better time to walk away?” he asks.
“No,” she admits. And so Breach resolutely turns its
back on the larger and more momentous subject it raises — the
subject of patriotism: what it means and what it demands of us.
Whittaker Chambers, who spied for the Russians back in the days
when lots of very bright people thought that the “bourgeois”
democracies of the West would soon be swept away and replaced by
Soviet-style Communism, later repudiated the Soviets and his career
as a spy. But he still thought that he was leaving the winning side
and going over to the losers. He believed that easy-going,
pleasure-loving Americans would be no match for the fanatical
dedication of the Communists. If, subsequently, Soviet communism
collapsed of its own internal contradictions, it didn’t necessarily
mean that Chambers was wrong about the weakness of American will —
which is undoubtedly much weaker today than it was when he came
forth to denounce his fellow spies in the early days of the Cold
War. Then we were prepared to sacrifice more than 30,000 dead to
prevent South Korea from being overrun by Communists. Now we are
told that a majority of Americans think that a tenth as many is too
high a price to pay to defeat another enemy who is (at least)
equally dedicated and fanatical.
Like Eric O’Neill, in other words, we’re happy to put our
“relationships” (among other things) first and leave the deadly
struggle for political and moral hegemony in the world to sad,
catless Agent Burroughs and others like her who may be supposed to
have a taste for such things. Perhaps our dependence on the
all-volunteer military has taught us that patriotism is voluntary
too. Like Cindy Sheehan or Senator Jim Webb or the “Not in My Name”
protesters, we imagine that we can simply opt out of the war and go
back to the way things were before. At best we hold to the
draftee’s credo as enunciated here by Mr. O’Neill’s father (Bruce
Davison), though he is himself a graduate of the Naval Academy:
“Get on the boat, do your job, get back home again.” Did Robert
Hanssen understand this about us? Did he conclude, like Whittaker
Chambers, that only one side in what they used to call the Great
Game was really serious about it — and that it wasn’t the side he
was supposed to be on?
Perhaps Robert Hanssen — now serving a life sentence along with
the Unabomber, Zacarias Moussaoui, shoe-bomber Richard Reid and
various other jihadis at the Supermax Federal Prison in Florence,
Colorado — doesn’t know the answer himself. But the film-makers
would have been better employed in asking it than in speculating
about such trivial psychological explanations as his mistreatment
as a child by his father, his sexual perversions or his apparently
excessive attachment to the Roman Catholic church. To me it was a
bit of a surprise that they downplayed the sex and concentrated on
the religious and moralistic side of Hanssen’s personality, though
neither gets us very far. Hollywood naturally gravitates to
religiosity when any misdeeds are in question, as if its very
presence in the background must offer some explanation ipso
facto.
“I don’t like women in pants,” says Hanssen to O’Neill one day.
“Men wear pants. We don’t need any more Hillary Clintons.” Well,
OK. Such blatant sexism is only what we might expect from such a
Holy Joe. He also has retrograde tastes in music, listening to the
popular, big-band music of his father’s generation rather than the
stuff his contemporaries favored when young. Such a reactionary
must be capable of anything, I guess, though there are plenty of
others like him who never sell out their country to the Russians.
Why, I myself am partial to the music of the 1930s and 1940s!
To the film’s credit, it recognizes that it has got us no nearer
to accounting for the mystery of Hanssen’s treachery — or even
whether or not he was a genuine religious believer. Such questions
must be forever unanswerable, and the film ends with Hanssen
himself saying: “The ‘why’ doesn’t mean a thing, does it?” No, it
doesn’t. Treason is treason no matter how it is motivated. Insofar
as the movie is just about Robert Hanssen and how he was caught,
this is the right way to end it. But insofar as it is about loyalty
and treachery and patriotism and how Americans feel about such
things — and how these feelings make us behave on the world stage
— it is disappointingly inconclusive.
