Breach: A Review

Perhaps the most important image from the movie Breach is prayer. “Pray more” is the answer given by Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent who was arrested in 2001 for selling information to the Soviet Union and to Russia over at least 15 years, to Eric O’Neill, the young agent recruited to aid Hanssen’s investigation, over the stress he was experiencing in his job. “Pray for me” Hanssen cries after he is caught. Indeed, Hanssen does just that, as we see him praying throughout the film, prayers that only reveal the haunted nature of his life. We are told the outcome at the beginning of the film, and so even those that don’t know the history can engage the film with a sense of doom as we watch this duplicitous character’s life unfold.

The Hanssen of the movie appears to be a deeply religious person. He attends daily mass, and speaks with disapproval on O’Neill’s comment about an attractive woman. He is deeply concerned about O’Neill’s Catholic faith and about the faith and church membership of O’Neill’s wife, a disinterested Protestant. He is devoted to his wife, loved by his grandchildren, and offers a faith that informs his conversation, and changes how he acts in his daily life. He is the model of a “good Catholic,” and a good Christian.

Of course, there is an edge to this brand of faith. He is stern in his discipline, and looks down on those that don’t share his discipline. While he would fiercely fend off various sins, he seems victim to the fundamental sin of pride. In this, he fits a Hollywood stereotype, a judgmental Christian, devoted in his faith and dismissive of lesser versions. That, of course, and the hypocrisy that underlies his very existence. For all the surface faith and practice, Hanssen is a master at betrayal. He betrays his country, selling secrets while persuading himself he is a patriot for doing so, and betraying his wife, videotaping their sexual encounters and mailing them to others, and describing their sexual encounters online. He betrays those closest to him as a matter of course, leaving us to make sense of this complex character.

The script frames the story around O’Neill’s slow discovery of these details. While Ryan Phillipe does a good job in this role, it is Chris Cooper’s Robert Hanssen that is the real interest. The movie does not want to answer the question that most of us wonder about most, that is, the question of why. Instead, we are exposed to glimpses of the duplicity and the at times conflicting reasons that Hanssen might give. He is obviously bitter at a career route that left him behind, while the ones with more personality succeeded. He reveals an arrogance about his own capabilities that his long success as a mole would seem to confirm. But in all of this, there is a captivity, as Hanssen appears haunted by something that hours of mass, prayer and confession can’t quite cure.

As I said, the Hanssen of Breach is a Hollywood stereotype, a hypocritical Christian who substitutes integrity for judgment. Of course, the challenge in the stereotype is that in this case it is largely true. The real Robert Hanssen did attend mass daily, did speak of an intensely serious faith, did betray his country for most of his 25-year career, and did betray his wife. He was a man of contradictions, contradictions that challenge us to explain this conflict.
Hanssen invites us to deepen our own understanding of duplicity. The testimony of the Christian faith is that the darkness of human sin is a universal reality. We should all expect to encounter duplicity in ourselves because we are simultaneously sinner and saint, the battleground for the war between human depravity and the redeeming work of the Holy Spirit. While Scripture testifies that this war has a clear end in the lives of Christians, it is a war that is experienced with great intensity while we endure it.

It is interesting to consider that Hanssen’s time at mass, and his apparent devotion to the church may have had little to do with a front. Is it possible that his faith was genuine? That in that time at mass or in confession, he was seeking an escape from himself? Perhaps Hanssen offers us a glimpse at the difference, once known in Christian circles but now often overlooked, between an authentic seeker and an authentic disciple. It is possible that Hanssen was the former, though the fruit in his life casts serious doubts on whether he was the latter.

We live with a temptation in the modern church of reducing faith to simple decisions and clean processes that people can follow. The problem with this, the problem that Breach exposes, is that sin is deeper than this, and can’t reliably be uprooted from the human soul through mechanistic processes. The freedom from the kind of duplicity that defines Hanssen’s life requires a supernatural work, a work that offers a far deeper vision of transformation that Hanssen ever found in his hours of devotion.