The Little Moments: BREACH

The best moments in film are sometimes big. Big reveals, big moments, big emotions tying into big realizations. "Luke, I am your father." "Mein Furher, I can walk!" "You can't handle the truth!" It's moments like those that reverberate in pop culture, blaze and sear their way into our collective memories. But I find, more and more, as I dig and expand my cinematic pallete, that it's really the small moments in films that give those big moments weight. A glance. A softly spoken line. A shaking hand that betrays a hidden fear or grief. Little pieces that, taken out of context, might not seem so impressive, but executed in their given story can hit you harder than the biggest plot twist ever. Without these moments, those big ones would diminish, and that's what I'm going to start focusing on.

"I matter. Plenty."

Breach is one of those films built on small moments, which never give way to big ones. It's very uncommon for a thriller, in the modern sense of the word, anyway; the film tackles a recent event but feels like something more akin to the mid-70s, when Hollywood was free of the Production Code but hadn't yet been taken over by corporations. You can easily see where it would be tempting to sex the story of Robert Hanssen up, to indulge and make it a more recognizable spy thriller.  There's the 25 year FBI agent who is really a traitor. The young and eager to impress analyst, yearning to make agent, who is assigned to trail him and also gain his trust. And of course, the stern but noble director whose focus never wavers from her target, but also makes sure the little greenhorn doesn't lose his way. Throw in some neon lighting, eighteen too many camera swoops per scene, and an average shot length of 1.8 seconds and this could've been a Tony Scott film, except the whole story would've been relocated to war torn Kosovo or a train that won't stop, and Hanssen would be recast as Denzel Washington.


Billy Ray, who directed the similarly subdued Shattered Glass, thankfully doesn't do that. And why would he? The film opens by telling us what happened: Robert Hanssen, over the course of nearly three decades, sold secrets to the Soviets, comprimising the identity of at least 50 assests and costing at least 3 of those their lives, and he did so while in the same breath cursing the "godless" communists and singing the praises of the very nation he was betraying. Some would say this is an odd way to start of a film that is built on intrigue and discovery, but it sets an interesting tone: we know what the man did, now let's see if we can explore the why. We get no clear answers, but we get many telling clues, all of which come with a dose of restraint from Chris Cooper, giving what might be one of the most underappreciated performances of the now gone 00's.

Right from the beginning, Cooper tells us a big thing about Hanssen, and he does so without saying a word. Walking through the parking garage of the Federal Building, he passes by several personalized "Reserved For" signs, all for important members of the FBI, people whose jobs and titles neccessitate saving them a spot close to the elevators. None of these signs say "Chris Hanssen," even though we can see on his face that he thinks one of them should. 25 years of busting his ass, doing brilliant work, much of which he considers a poor use of his not-inconsiderable intelligence. He'd have one of those spots, or the office with a window, if only he'd play ball with the office politics; if only he'd put his hand in with the rest of them he'd get somewhere where his voice would matter, where his intelligence wouldn't be, as he puts it, "an afterthought."

But throughout the film, Hanssen never opens up and says this. He never gives those after him the satisfaction of knowing the why, because in that way, he's still got something that they don't, and will never get. He's made millions of dollars selling secrets to the Soviets, but we can tell that it's not the money that's driving him. It's something else, something that gets hinted at but only fully brought to context in a single line I opened this piece with.

As his retirement nears and his job gets relegated to basically a glorified paper pusher with a secretary, Hanssen feels his worth, or lack of it, in the agency in full force. What's more, the creeping paranoia that has always lurked on the horizon of his mind is beginning to make its way inward, and when mixed with a half flask of whiskey makes for a unstable reciepie. He is, for the first time, beginning to get scared about getting found out, now that he doesn't have the access to at least be able see what's going on on the other side of the window. He brings his secretary, Eric (Ryan Philippe), to a quiet area of a park one night, drunk and feeling worthless, and pulls a gun on him. He wants to know if he can trust Eric, because at this point his demons are awake and he needs to trust someone. But weakness isn't something that he's programmed to show, and so he asks for it at the point of a gun. This is a moment that could've been big, or used as a "gotcha" moment where Hanssen digs his own grave, but instead gives us the one portal into this man's tortured soul. Eric, desperate to not blow his cover or catch a bullet, tells it to his boss as he sees it: he's got an over-inflated ego, a brilliant mind but a crappy set of social skills, and what he's really angry about is that in four weeks he's going to walk out of the FBI building forever and know that nothing he did mattered; that he didn't matter.

Hanssen, the worst part of the storm gone but the fury remaining, lowers his gun and starts to move away, but before he does, he utters one line in a tone so quiet and barely restrained that he might as well be shouting to the heavens:

"I matter. Plenty."

In his mind, in his eyes, what he's been doing for the last 25 years is show just how gaping a hole our nation's security had in the middle of it, if a man like him, who isn't important enough for a reserved parking space or a office with a window in it, has been able to walk out with secrets valued in the billions of dollars and was able to do so without anyone so much as glancing in his direction. No one else could do that, that line says, no one was smart enough to catch me, and I deserve some credit, if you please. To him, he was doing us a service, in committing these crimes, not out of malicious intent, but so we might make that security better. But his pride was a self-serving one, and he valued his intelligence so much higher than anyone else's that if we weren't smart enough to catch him, then we weren't deserving to catch him. He knew what he was doing was wrong, but went ahead anyway thinking someone would stop him, and when they didn't he finally had the personal satisfaction that he was, indeed, the smartest person in the room, and that kind of knowledge is a powerful and dangerous weapon to have, especially if it perpetuates over a quarter century. No, in Hanssen's eyes, he matters plenty. Whether the walls ever close in on him or not, he's changed the way the FBI does business forever, and his name is on that change.

It was his ballgame, we just couldn't figure out the rules until now. Little wonder, then, that his first words when finally confronted by the FBI after being surveyed in the act wasn't an act of denial, or some sort of physical resistance, it was a calm, resigned "What took you so long?"