Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief

When John le Carre appropriated a nursery rhyme for his 1974 book about spies and spy-catchers, he borrowed just three words, "tinker, tailor, soldier," then sexed up the whole thing by adding a fourth word, "spy." The new film Breach, about the FBI counterintelligence agent Robert Philip Hanssen, who sold secrets to the Soviet Union and later Russia for more than two decades, suggests that it's time to dust off the rest of that same rhyme: "rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief." Now in prison, where he's serving a life sentence, Hanssen was a little of each; he was also greedy, pathetic, malevolent — a creep's creep.

In the spring of 2002, an assistant director at the FBI explained Hanssen's success as a spy this way: "Succinctly put, security, other than physical security, was not inculcated into the culture as a priority that must be practiced, observed and improved upon every day." No kidding. For many of the 25 years he worked at the FBI, he covertly thrived in that culture, like a stealth malignancy. On the February 2001 morning of his arrest, he attended Mass at a Roman Catholic church where the services were in Latin and many in the congregation belonged to Opus Dei. Later that day, he dropped a garbage bag stuffed with intelligence secrets in a Virginia park not far from his home.

One of the strengths of Breach, a thriller that manages to excite and unnerve despite our knowing the ending, is how well it captures the utter banality of this man and his world. Unlike Kim Philby, an aristocratic figure who swanned across the world while passing classified British and American information to the Soviets, Hanssen, played by the stellar Chris Cooper, comes across as a middle manager type, a drone in a suit. The real double agent practiced his tradecraft in Washington and New York, not Cairo and Istanbul, and delivered the goods — more than 6,000 pages — in garbage bags secured with tape. With his weekend casuals and Ford Taurus, he might have been just another suburban dad bagging leaves.

The director Billy Ray, who wrote the screenplay with Adam Mazer and William Rotko, uses a young agent-in-training, Eric O'Neill (Ryan Phillippe), to jimmy his way into the story. (The real O'Neill, now a lawyer, served as a consultant on the film, which helps explains why it feels true in tone and texture.) Shortly before Hanssen was caught, the bureau assigned O'Neill to work for him. The younger man had been told only that Hanssen was a sexual deviant (he had some freaky habits), not that he was a turncoat. This lack of knowledge about the assignment and its dangers suits Phillippe well, largely because he always looks as if he were hiding something behind those nervous eyes of his.

Ray last directed the 2003 drama Shattered Glass, about that artful dodger Stephen Glass' tarnished tenure at The New Republic. Like the earlier film, Breach is about secrets and lies, and smart, arrogant men waylaid by their own pride and pathologies. Shattered Glass has its moments, if not enough of them; as in Breach, Ray's unapologetic seriousness is one of the film's strongest assets. Even so, only a filmmaker with a naive, blinkered view both of journalism and human nature, and with so little grasp of what can happen when youthful ambition meets institutional self-importance, could have been surprised by a Stephen Glass or reached such dizzying heights of outrage.