Alexander Gandar watched Breach and then chatted to it's director Billy Ray and the stars of Breach, his second feature.

Fact: if I were born in America, I’d really hope my first words were ‘four more years’. Because, to be honest, to be liberal in that great superficially-classless-nouveau-riche mess of states just seems like so much effort.

Where I’m from, somewhere in the mythical pastures of the South Pacific, liberalism is not even an issue, it just is. We just are. I’m generalising, of course, but we’ve had a left government for about a decade now, so take that to the bank, nay-sayers. Largely, and here come more gobs of sickening generalisation, with conservatism comes a swaggering patriotism, thick with obstinate belief. The basic brilliance of Billy Ray’s Breach is that it can be read either way: as yet another princely narrative of stubborn-patriotic-chest-swelling-American-pride, or a subtle-but-jubilant-‘FuckYou!’ to such perceptions.

Breach is Ray’s second film, his directorial follow-up to the similarly themed, critically acclaimed but strangely under-successful Shattered Glass (perhaps casting Hayden Christensen as the lead in the midst of his Star Wars rubbishing was a bad move), and shows a real maturing stylistically, with more pensive camera than you could throw Roman Polanski at.

Post-screening then, when I find myself faced by Ray himself and two of the film’s stars: Hollywood heavyweights Chris Cooper and Ryan Philippe, questions abound about his stylistic intentions.

Ray: "I’m very much a seventies movie guy; I love those movies and the American filmmakers of the seventies. They just had that sort of invisible style, which seems to get lost today. When you watch one of those movies you’re not thinking about who’s directing it, you’re just absorbed by the story, and that required a certain conspiracy between the director, and the DP, and the writer, and of course the cast. You let the story be the star."

Conspiracy was a cunning conceit for Ray to bring up in this context, as deceit is at the core of this film and on the surface, and everywhere in between.

A quick synopsis: Breach follows two months in the relationship between Robert Hanssen (Chris Cooper) – the greatest-ever American traitor of the FBI – and Eric O’Neill (Ryan Philippe) – the rookie-cum-prodigy who is assigned to bring him down. Cue head-spinning layers of deception which turn out to be incredibly complex to write down (trust me, I tried) but are actually incredibly simple on-screen. The deception is so thematic it is invisible – Ray sutures it into every detail. The film is brimming with it to the point where it begins to spill over – hence the ‘creative conspiracy’.

Ray: "I like writing about people who deceive, because, when you’re writing, the very goal of the craft is to create subtext for your characters, that’s what your actors are acting, the stuff that’s in the parentheses… And when you’re writing about a liar, they provide their own subtext, because every single line is the opposite of what they’re thinking. That gives the actor enormous room to exercise their craft."

As he said himself, it even extends past the film itself into the reality of making the film. If I wanted to get all critical theory about it, which I do, I could say that cinema itself is a type of conspiracy; a creation designed exclusively to deceive, to convince an audience that fictional events really took place. Another extra-diegetic layer is added then – stick with me – when, as is the case with Breach, the subject material is factual.

Ray: "I don’t want to be labelled a one-trick pony, so I’m going to have to move on from professional liars. I do like true stories, because although they impose certain constraints upon you – you can’t say something about someone if it’s just outright not true – I try to look at telling a true story as an opportunity. By that I mean 'What are the chances that alone in a room I could create a character that was better than Robert Hanssen?' No way. No one could come up with that character. He’s just so idiosyncratic, and strange, and so contradictory."

Yes. He is. He spent 22 years of his career with the FBI selling insider secrets to the Soviets. Wuh-oh. Not only this, but he was videoing himself boffing his wife and posting it online, letting his chums watch, that kind of thing. Oh dear. He was also a zealous family man and staunchly religious – of the fearsomely conservative Opus Dei faith. Man. My rug could win an Oscar playing this part. So, dropped into the mitts of a ripening Chris Cooper, it’s meaty. As Ryan Philippe says, Cooper is “the best actor [America] has.” I’ve sometimes thought so. Well, at least top five. This from Cooper:

"I think one of my objectives was to make him a human being, and not work toward making him such a demon. The material that I read, and the people that worked with him, um, honestly felt, and I believe, that he was able to compartmentalise his life."

Then Ray tosses in:

"[Chris] doesn’t stand outside the character and judge the character, he just behaves, and he has objectives and he goes after them as a human being. Chris never came up to me and said 'Should I make this scarier, should I play this darker, should I be more of a moustache-twirling villain?' That’s just not who he is as an actor."

Mix that with Philippe’s above comment, and spoon in a little more from Ray:

"Chris draws a lot of attention for this part and I hope he’ll draw more. It’s very much the bells and whistles part of the movie but it’s really important to know that he wasn’t in there acting by himself, you know, he was banging up against [Ryan] in every scene. I threw [Ryan] in with some pretty serious racehorses, and [he] challenged them all, and helped Chris create that performance."

Dash a little more from Philippe:

"[Doing this film] was about working with this man to my right, and the other man to my right, and what that felt like I was able to watch them do. And…I think Billy, for me, telling a story that a lot of people know the ending to but still finding a way for there to be suspense, and drama, and dread is a true achievement"

And we have the recipe for a pretty serious ego rub-down on our hands. Ew. Sticky. They do deserve a measure of mutual massage. What they’ve crafted here is a focussed thriller with tight dialogue and palpable tension.

Ray: "We’ve shown it quite a few times to members of the American intelligence community and they think we got it right. That’s a huge endorsement for me."

Hurrah. But what’s wrong with it? Because it isn’t a five-star piece of cinema. I’m going to pay-off my America-bashing and tackle the foundations here, stand back… I think the ideology might be hollow. Despite my bold assertions earlier about patriotism, I still struggle to understand why Americans take betrayal so personally. Laura Linney, as O’Neill’s superior, has a particularly painful line: ‘You know what I really hate? The thought that my entire career has been a waste of time.’ But then can later talk flippantly about the Russian agents they’ve ‘turned’ into American informants. Does no one see this glaring hypocrisy? This is almost definitely the film Ray intended to make:

"The movie goes to great lengths to say that the ‘why’ doesn’t mean a thing. We are what we do, our actions define us. And from my point of view it’s never mattered to me why he did what he did, the point is that he did it. He put all of our lives in jeopardy, and, you know, cost the government billions of dollars – I heard one estimate put it at $28 billion worth of damage that he did. And of course, his actions resulted in the loss of lives."

Yeah, it’s treason, and the man is doubtlessly a criminal, but, to quote The Wire (one of my favourite TV shows of the last few years): “All in the game, yo, all in the game.” Perhaps that’s what really defines Americanism – the blind promulgation of their own safety and security above all others. So, am I thus of the opinion that this is to go down in cinema history as a gloating piece of Americana, biased to the point of nausea? Well, no. As I said before, the film is open to multiple readings. Good. But, problem: I don’t know know if Ray even made up his mind.

Ray: "I’m sure the movie would have been different had 9/11 not occurred… There’s one moment in the movie where Hanssen is lecturing Eric O’Neill about how the FBI and the CIA don’t co-operate, and how the enemies of our country aren’t quite so picky – they’ll join forces with anyone who shares their hatred of us. That was my personal way of trying to describe how Robert Hanssen probably didn’t see 9/11 coming SPECIFICALLY, of course, but he did see that there was something leaking pretty badly within the intelligence community and he was trying to call attention to it… To this day if you ask Robert Hanssen why he did what he did he’d say that he was a patriot who was trying to call the attention of the intelligence community to its own lack of maturity. I felt he had to be slightly prescient in that right, so, looking from a post 9/11 reality, you’d say ‘That guy was onto something’. It’s subtle, but it’s there."

Cooper: "I’d like to add just a little bit, something that struck me as very interesting, and I toyed with these words… and for me, they made sense. One of the final letters Hanssen wrote before he broke his relations with the Soviets, the Kremlins, [turns to Ray] maybe you could help me here…"

Ray: "It’s: 'I’m either insanely brave or insanely loyal, take your pick.'"

Cooper: "Yeah, 'There is insanity in all the answers.' But the line that I wanted to concentrate on was 'If you ask me, I am insanely loyal.' To me that meant 'my loyalty is so strong that I’ll give material, information to the Soviets to show you – The United States, the FBI – how vulnerable you are.'"

Wait, so, now he’s a hero? If the filmmakers can’t make up their minds, then how are the audience supposed to? Watching the film does feel like being in a spin cycle, this constant churning of loyalties, unsure of who to cling to as hero/villain, the characters don’t make the decisions you expect them to… Which, normally, would be promising.

Philippe: "That’s what I like about this movie, I think it’s very un-Hollywood."

And I liked that too. There aren’t any overblown special effects or explosions. There isn’t any Halle Berry. But your generic audience can be a simple mass – and perhaps what Breach needed was to just nudge us a touch more one way or the other. Thus, I think your average post-Breach-conversation will go like this:

Tim: Man, Chris Cooper rules.
Fleur: Yeah. And Ryan’s getting a l’il chunky.
Tim: Yeah. So, did you like it?
Fleur: Uh, I guess. Did you?
Tim: Sure, it was okay.
(silence)
Tim: Wanna get a drink?

Breach. It’s okay. Cooper might win an Oscar. Perhaps though, just like Hanssen’s betrayal was all but forgotten in the chaos of 9/11, the film will drown in the box-office madness of Philippe’s forthcoming Viking flick.

Philippe: "I get to throw hammers, that kind of thing."

Can’t wait.

by Alexandar Gandar