Breach – Ben Miller
A great drama of the arrogance and underlying bitterness of a man trapped in a life of compromise.
Why does a man betray his country? Breach — based on the true story of FBI mole Robert Hanssen — doesn’t quite answer this question. What it does do is show the arrogance and underlying bitterness of a man trapped in a life of compromise.
Portrayed by Chris Cooper in an Oscar nomination-deserving performance, Hanssen wears his rectitude on his sleeve. To aspiring FBI agent Eric O’Neill (played by Ryan Phillippe) Hanssen seems beyond reproach, a man devoted to his religious faith, his family and his country.
O’Neill is assigned to clerk for Hanssen, a legendary intelligence operative, while surreptitiously monitoring Hanssen’s alleged frequenting of Internet porn sites. When O’Neill questions his assignment, agent Kate Burroughs (Laura Linney) tells him that Hanssen is selling secrets to Russian spies and has been at it for years. But they need proof and they want O’Neill to help get it.
This reviewer, accustomed to Hollywood’s poetic license when telling true stories, assumed when watching the movie that O’Neill was a made-up character, a fresh-faced idealist meant to be a good-guy contrast with Hanssen. I’ve since learned that O’Neill was a real person assigned to work for and spy on Hanssen. As in the movie, he in fact did have a close call, and he was afraid of being shot. (Hanssen was an expert marksman.)
Hanssen was arrested in early 2001, before 9/11. The FBI arrested him, but the Bureau doesn’t come off well in the movie. The FBI is portrayed as a gun-culture agency where intelligence-gathering skills are secondary to being a good shot. Its professional distrust extends, at least in Breach, to the other U.S. intelligence agencies — the CIA, the DIA, NSA — almost as much as to the Russians. In this slow-moving bureaucracy, the only way to get a good computer was to lift one off the pallets in the hallways.
There is suspense in this movie, but it is much more a character study than a thriller. Breach is a great opportunity for an actor, and Cooper uses it to cap a career of powerful, yet understated roles (Lone Star and Adaptation; for the latter, he won a best supporting actor Oscar).
Filmed mostly in Toronto, the movie still has great scenes of Washington, D.C., many shot at night because it is, in the end, a dark movie (cinematography by Tak Fujimoto). Directed by Billy Ray. Music composed by Mychael Danna.
Great drama • PG-13 • 110 mins.
Because I Said So – Jonathan Parker
There’s nothing wrong with a romantic comedy being a little light in the originality department, but this film has no new slant on anything.
Diane Keaton plays an overbearing mother and Mandy Moore is her daughter on the make in the simple-minded and unfunny comedy Because I Said So. Director Michael Lehman (My Giant, Hudson Hawk) offers up a film that is like a lame sitcom without an original idea in its head. The only thing less frequent than the laughs are the surprises.
Daphne (Keaton) has three pretty daughters. Two of them are recently happily married without children (Lauren Graham and Piper Perabo), while a third, Milly (Moore), is continually getting her heart broken or being stood up before she can even get anything started. Mother-hen Daphne takes her usual meddling advice to a new level by secretly placing a web ad in search of a Mr. Right for Milly, with Daphne screening the applicants. The winner is upstanding waspy architect Jason (Tom Everett Scott). Milly starts to date him and handsome musician and competition-also-ran Johnny (Gabriel Macht). Predictable predicaments happen, and love naturally finds a way.
With its run-of-the-mill plot, the film tries to get its laughs out of putting Keaton in clichéd comedic situations. This is truly a situation comedy, with Keaton responding ‘humorously’ to porn on the Internet, to a stuck navigation system in her car, to a gauntlet of bad prospective dates for her daughter, to having sex with the only other person over 40 in the movie, to spying on her daughter. To top it off, she has this strange penchant for falling into cakes. It’s the Diane Keaton clown show.
We feel like we’ve seen most of the scenes in this film countless times. We feel like we’ve seen Diane Keaton do many of these scenes countless times before. How many times is a woman over 60 enjoying sex funny? Or a dog humping a pillow? Or the odd people who respond to a personal ad?
You can almost see the big-shot exec who green-lighted this project explaining: “Because I said so.” Too bad.
Poor comedy • PG-13 • 107 mins.