The stakes are far higher in Breach, of course, but Ray wisely holds his indignation in check in favor of something more analytical. When he keeps it cool, the film works surprisingly well. Ray doesn't do much with the camera, but his no-frills, almost generic visual style suits the subject. In contrast to the world of shadows and mystery Robert De Niro fashions for The Good Shepherd, his origin story about the CIA, Ray serves up a bland, anonymous corporation, one in which organizational rivals bitterly compare offices, and shrink-wrapped computers sit stacked in the harshly lighted halls. It's The Office without the jokes; Kafka without the soul. In other words, it's the FBI, stripped of the usual movie-made gloss.
This conception of the FBI as a more bureaucratically constipated, possibly more malevolent version of, say, Microsoft, if nowhere near as securely fortified, is Ray's masterstroke. Hanssen might well have been insane, as he himself suggested to his Soviet contacts, but he was also a worker bee. His insanity might have been hardwired into him or simply (or not so simply) a symptom of working too many years in counterintelligence, where deception and detection are the rules of the game, and pride and promotion its only rewards. Hanssen earned promotions, but perhaps never enough to suit his pride. Certainly it wasn't enough for his bank account: Kim Philby spied for Communism; a real capitalist, Hanssen earned US$1.4 million.
Ray doesn't explain Hanssen; rather, he offers us symptoms and secrets, procedures and routines, as well as a fundamentally banal man who, in any other job, would have been just another Walter Mitty. Hanssen used various aliases during his spy days, including the improbable Ramon Garcia. (As if sensing his neediness, the Soviets gave Ramon love and money: "Congratulations on your promotion. We wish you all the very best in your life and career.") Cooper, who looks more like a Robert than a Ramon, keeps his face pulled in tight for much of the film, like a fist held firm to his chest. He rouses our curiosity but never solicits our pity. It's enough that he and Ray make this monster human.
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