Breach
dir. Billy Ray
2007

"God wants you to have nice things."
- Tammy Faye Bakker

"Thank you. Thank you for showing me this is who I am."
- Jeff, Hard Candy

"How many guys do you know whose best friend is also their priest? "
- Daulton Lee, The Falcon and the Snowman


In Breach, Chris Cooper plays Robert Hanssen, once famously described by the Department of Justice as being at the center of the "the worst intelligence disaster in US history."

A difficult, demanding man of intense faith and even more intense secrecy, Cooper's Hanssen is an enigma hiding in plain sight.

The story is told from the point of view of Hanssen's assistant, Eric O'Neill, played by Ryan Phillippe. O'Neill was assigned to Hanssen by internal FBI investigators for the purpose of setting up a sting and catching Hanssen in the act of espionage.

Throughout the film, we are presented with various partial explanations for Hanssen's behavior.

He's a "sexual deviant," by which the FBI means that he hangs out in internet sex chat rooms, swaps tapes of he and his wife en flagrante and enjoys the company strippers. All of which makes him about as deviated from the norm as lite beer, if the headlines are to be believed.

He's an intensely religious catholic, a member of Opus Dei.

Abused by his father, Hanssen grows into a hard-edged, judgmental, cruel man with no tolerance for failure (or even imperfection) and no patience for bureacratic inefficiency.

Paranoid and secretive, he naturally fears not only being found out, but being left out of any information loop, anywhere.

Intelligent and capable, he is often the smartest person in the room and is even more often frustrated by the ineptitude of his superiors.

As a hodge-podge of bad wiring and mixed up values, Hanssen becomes a symbol for the very intelligence agency he betrays, an agency (along with our other national intelligence and law enforcement agencies) whose dry-rot corruption would become apparent over the years subsequent to his arrest in 2001 (six months prior to 9/11.)

The FBI of Breach is a cold, impersonal machine. The rhetoric used to decribe Hanssen ("worst intelligence disaster in US history"), while apt, is prattled off like so many political talking points.

When Laura Linney's character speaks with passion about the integrity of the FBI and chastizes O'Neill for not maintaining secrecy from his wife, we see that a narrow line separates her from Hanssen. His passionate rhetoric about "serving the needs of the Bureau" reads just as strongly as hers.

We can only imagine how Linney's character proceeds after this story ends as she sits, alone, in her empty apartment ("I don't even have a cat") and wonders what it all adds up to in the end. How long before O'Neill is assigned to investigate her?

In JFK, Donald Sutherland's Mr. X famously asserts that the how and the who of the Kennedy assasination distract us from the important question: why? This is, of course, the fundamental flaw in conspiracy-based thinking. In conspiracy-think, the details and the reality matter less than the imagined framework of motives and counter-motives that the supposed villains operate under. Should any inconvenient evidence challenge this framework, well, that just proves that the villains are devious in covering their tracks.

But, for Hanssen, ultimately the what far outshines any hypothetical why.

Sure, everybody likes money. But if you want to get rich, don't join the FBI.

Sure, the egos of intelligent people can be powerful things and the knowledge that you're putting one over on the great FBI even as you work dilligently in service of that same institution would give anyone a perverse thrill. Then again, that's why the Good Lord invented cards.

Sure, an abusive parent can put a lot of bad thoughts in your head. But adults are responsible for their choices nonetheless.

As the layers of excuses fall away, Hanssen is laid bare. A soulful man eaten alive by a soulless machine, now condemned by that same machine.

And as we face the parade of Albertos Gonzales, Monicae Goodling and Karls Rove, all doing a "heckuva job" defending this country from "the terrorists," we are left to wonder, does it matter much why they're doing what they're doing? Isn't the what damning enough?

Three and a half stars. Agent Jason says there's nothing wrong with liking strippers. They're good people.

Don't Stop Believing: The Sopranos Finale

"Now everybody."

- Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

By now, you surely know how The Sopranos ended. Or rather, stopped.

Cop out or genius? Or genius because it was a cop-out?

Whether chosen out of brilliance or laziness (as we computer programmers know, the two are often identical), the ending did serve its purpose: while remaining true to the themes of the show, it punctuated the moral ambiguity not just of Tony, but of those of us who found ourselves being his reluctant fans.

Tony Soprano was the Archie Bunker of the 21st Century. He said what others would merely think and shouted what others would merely whisper.

He was a racist, a thug, a bully and an abuser.

He chewed people up and spat them out, all the while pitying himself for his long-gone less than perfect childhood.

He idolized his father, the abusive criminal bully, and blamed his (admitedly unpleasant) mother for all his adult problems.

He was a whiner. He was a jerk. He was a murderer.

Yet we couldn't get enough...and Chase never gave us enough. We always anticipated grand opera mob wars, 'Gangs of New York' style running gun battles in the suburbs of New Jersey, Shakespearian mechanations coming to grisly ends. Hamlet, MacBeth, The Godfather.

But Chase never gave us that...that was the point. These are people who have these kinds of fantasies in their heads but they live in the real world of flat tires, bad hair days, and generalized malaise.

The ending of The Sopranos divided fans between those who had been expecting a solid payoff because that's what "good storytelling" is supposed to give us and those who "get it" about David Chase and see the "payoffless opera" as being the consistent point.

As usual, everybody is right and everybody is wrong. It is true that when you set up a story filled with intrigue, it's disappointing not to reach closure. It's also true that nothing in the way The Sopranos was constructed justified expecting a payoff.

I have witnesses on this one: I called the ending...partially. I knew that Chase would not pay off the big questions and the only real arc he'd finish would be AJ...though I thought he'd go bigger with that story than he did.

But why? Because it ultimately doesn't matter what happens to Tony.

People say that David Chase is laughing his ass off, but in his position I'd likely be shaking my head in disbelief. How many times can he lead us to the water of the "big moment" and show us that there's nothing there? That it's the little stuff that matters?

We're not supposed to think of Tony in the cafe as some big, ultimate moment...even though it was directed that way. We're supposed to see that no matter what happens in the few seconds after we cut to black, that Tony's story was complete well before the onion rings arrived.

The climactic scene for Tony is not the diner...it's the retirement home with the dementia-bound Uncle Junior. Junior invested his whole life in "this thing of ours" and has nothing for it...no kids, no memory (all lost to dementia), no respect, no influence, no accomplishment.

Tony is not much better off. He is in a hell of his own creation, like Michael Coreleone, he had to destroy his families (both literal and mob) in order to save them.

The final door for Tony closed in Las Vegas. On peyote in the desert, Tony looks into the rising sun and "gets it." What does he get? Later we find that he "gets" that there's "something bigger" going on. That we're connected to the eternal.

If that sounds a little more like Janice than Tony, not without good reason. The final door closed for Janice years ago.

Tony is not supposed to "get" that the universe is big and more complicated than he imagines. That's the kind of thing peyote makes everyone "get." Tony is supposed to get that he should quit being a gangster and a bully, go straight be a loving husband to his wife and father to his children and to repair some of the damage he's done to the world around him.

Instead, while he's "getting" the big cosmic picture, he's simultaneously not handling an asbestos removal project which would actually be one of his legitimate responsibilities which, if he did by the book and took seriously, could be the start of a reformed career in his supposed profession, waste management.

Instead, he lets the deadly dust seep into the waters of his own home state while he parties in the desert and "gets it."

By choosing to accept drug-induced, banal revelation over hard work and making true amends, his examined life comes to an abrupt end. Beyond that, it simply does not matter if his biological life ends in the next twenty seconds or in the next twenty years. His tale is complete.

Our craving for a plot-driven conclusion is understandable, as is the smug insight that the "show never was about closure."

But the fact remains, we do have a conclusion, we do have closure. This episode was a fitting requiem for an asshole bully content to remain an asshole bully so long as the onion rings keep flowing.

Don't stop.

Three stars. Big Jason says, don't (you) forget about it.