Breach. Is Chris Cooper our best character actor? That thought has occurred to me on more than one occasion, most recently after seeing him in Billy Ray’s 2007 docudrama about Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent who spent two decades peddling government secrets to the KGB. Except for the soppy score, Breach is a tremendously involving film whose makers get everything right–but in the end it is Cooper’s performance that turns a piece of well-crafted entertainment into something not unlike high art. Cooper’s Hanssen is a study in self-loathing arrogance, a fanatical zealot with something unknowably wrong at the core. Somehow I doubt that the real-life Robert Hanssen was half so interesting as the one we meet in Breach. So much the worse for real life (TT).
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
