Chris Cooper as Robert Hanssen in Breach
Movies for Grown-Ups
By Nancy Weber
When you watched The Departed, did you have trouble distinguishing Matt Damon from Leonardo DiCaprio, and visa versa? At first I thought it was just my habit of living life in a blur, or a familial tendency toward prosopagnosia — face-blindness (my daughter, Rose Fox, has become an articulate expert on the subject).
Or, considering The Departed through more generous eyes: Did the casting of near-twins devolve from a creative decision to underscore the fungibility of the two young cops? Good and evil just a haircut apart?
Further random sampling of other moviegoers convinces me that the conflation is about age — the age of the viewer.
“Damon and DiCaprio? Those pups!” commiserated a brilliant 50-ish friend, a professor who lectures on the micro-nuances of European economics. “Can anyone keep them straight?”
Well, yes, the kids can. (The same kids who can’t hear the difference between Frank Sinatra and Mel Torme.) Not for nothing are seniors’ movie tickets discounted; we’re seeing only 75 percent of the picture being seen by our youngers.
But surely there are movies for us?
I hit on a simple solution: Rule out any movie starring more than one pup. On a mid-March evening, watching Breach in a curiously near-empty theater, I made the unhappy discovery that even one pup may be too many.
Ryan Phillippe, playing real-life spy-catcher Eric O’Neill, kept disappearing in front of my eyes.
Maybe, I tried telling myself, that’s because he portrays a canny spook. But the truth is worse: From the get-go I had trouble believing in the fresh-faced Phillipe as an FBI agent. A Boy Scout, yes, maybe even an Eagle Scout; but a defender of the nation? Is that his bar-mitzvah suit he’s wearing so uncomfortably? Really, he’s allowed to drive a car, not to mention carry a gun? He’s married?
Breach takes us inside the unmasking of Robert Hanssen, perhaps the most damaging double-agent in U.S. history. Chris Cooper breathes life, or half-life, into Hanssen, operating behind an endlessly expressive face that was probably seamed and pouchy at birth. One minute sneering, the next minute oleaginous, he swings from piety to perversion to techno-savvy, not hiding his glee at being the smartest one in the room, any room.
Two months from the mandatory retirement age of 57, he’s brought down by Eric O’Neill, a newbie who hasn’t even made agent yet. The smartest one, with a well-honed coefficient of paranoia boosting his detectors, and Hanssen is beguiled by the pup factor.
Don’t trust anyone under 30.
Researching the film online, I note that Phillippe could be O’Neill’s brother. They share a perky yet resolute jaw line, ears angled toward the world, a broad forehead. The main physical difference is that Phillippe has more expensive-looking teeth. Throw in a Bureau haircut, and you have perfect casting.
Unless you grew up on the FBI movies of the ’50s, in which case Cooper (far more handsome than Hanssen) looks the way an agent ought to look.
As the closing credits roll, we learn that Hanssen is serving a life sentence in a Supermax prison in Florida, and a harsh version of that sentence: 23 hours of solitude a day. Wow.
Lonely in Florida—the endgame we dread.
Cruel and all too usual punishment. At least Hanssen doesn’t have to worry about health care.
(Do lifers get anti-depressants, though?)
Reviews of Breach — and of the 2002 made-for-TV film, The Robert Hanssen Story, with William Hurt as Hanssen — complain that we are never shown the motivation behind his perfidy. A Website devoted to the subject suggests that his sentence reflects the court’s frustration with his failure to answer the question: Why?
O’Neill says to Hanssen midway in Breach, and Hanssen says when has been captured: The what, not the why, is the thing that counts.
Maybe in Washington that flies; not in downtown New York. I have been mulling Hanssen’s why for two days, and the answer is clear.
It’s about forced retirement.
Hanssen always knew that one day he would be booted to make room for some pup. The clips of KGB operatives, on the other hand, show us men ripe in years. Hanssen’s Russian handlers had no plans to age him out, at least none we see in the film. Might have shot him, but that’s a different story.
Loyalty to our peers be damned. No way not to root for the pup in My Nose, Gayle Kirschebaum’s tragicomic short documentary about the knife-work her mother thinks will save Gayle’s life.
“I knew my biological clock was ticking. I didn’t know my nose was ticking,” says the lovely, funny, talented, single Gayle, as her mother drags her to plastic surgeons in New York and Florida. One doc, a Kabbalist, keeps staring over her head; when Gayle asks why he isn’t looking at her face, he says he’s focusing on a vision of the man who will marry her, post-op.
Mr. Husband is right there, the surgeon assures her, just waiting for her to be sculpted into an object worthy of romantic love.
Maybe it’s her mother, not her nose, who’s scaring away the fellows? I feel guilty as I write those words; I know the mistakes we mothers make in the name of love. Mrs. K., between face-lifts during the period the film was shot, believes she has benefited from cosmetic surgery, and maybe she has. If it’s good for the goose, it’s good for the gosling, right?
Wrong, which is why this is a big little movie. A romp but an important romp.
As the closing credits roll, Gayle dedicates My Nose to her father, who has recently died. He lived long enough to see the film, though, and proudly extolled Gayle’s talent. He is the parent we all mean to be, the one with right-on values who encourages the child to create, and the hell with surfaces. Kirschenbaum makes clear how she hungered for such affirmation from her mother.
I suspect many viewers will share my hope that Gayle sees her mother’s participation in the film as a reflection of respect and love, an act of amends-making. Mrs. K. has to have known she was cast as the villain — this woman who dressed her infant daughter like a dolly and now would subject her to the dangers of nontrivial surgery. You want to shake her by the shoulders: How dare she reinvent her daughter’s face — she who doesn’t see her daughter? And yet there she is on the screen, energetically offering herself up as an object of scorn.
Full disclosure: I happen to have a lot of nose. I’ve grown into it, but when I was younger, it had so much thereness, I was once offered a freebie by a plastic surgeon. My mother disliked the character-free noses of Jewish girls who got done for their sweet-sixteens; she disdained the whole gestalt of nose jobs; it was never even a question between us. But she repeatedly suggested I get bunion surgery. My mother wore sexy high heels and wanted me to be able to do the same. I went so far as to see a surgeon, who talked me out of it. Probably not a Kabbalist.
As we go to press, My Nose is starting to play festivals. You can track its progress by checking out Kirschenbaum’s Website, ww.kirschenbaumproductions.com. My Nose is distinguished by its heart, antic energy, laugh-aloud moments, willingness to discomfort, and visual integrity. It’s more than worth the detour.
After you see it, reread The Nose, by Gogol. Please. It’s been too long. Since you read Gogol, I mean.
Breach was shot in such low light, it plays as black and white in the viewer’s memory. Checking Out, a fall release now widely available in DVD, is the aesthetic opposite: It seems to have been shot in some brand new ultra-Technicolor, so saturated and variegated are the tones and textures.
This is the right look for a story that’s gaudy, gussied up, over the top in shtick and sentiment — and really works. The well-written script is characterized by one-liners that run true to character and are seldom throw-aways. Snippets from Hamlet and The Tempest don’t hurt, either.
Renowned Shakespearean and Yiddish-theater star Morris Applebaum (Peter Falk) is feeling fine at 90, which is why he invites his family and friends to a party at which he plans to make his final exit. He’s seen too many of his contemporaries unpleasantly surprised by messy, painful illnesses, and he wants a different finale. “Why should I live like an actor and die like an audience?” he asks. It’s an actor’s privilege and responsibility to know how the play ends. His script calls for a last act with sleeping pills and single-malt Scotch.
Enter, wailing, his dysfunctional middle-aged children: twice-divorced psychologist Ted (David Paymer), failed actor and failing car dealer Barry (Judge Reinhold), and TV producer Flo (Laura San Giacomo). Ted suffers from an excess of niceness and normality. Flo long ago gave up on her womanhood, out-glammed by her actress mother who, though dead now, still awes her. Barry and his wife (Shera Danese) never stop bickering; their teenagers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Dan Byrd) are hopelessly self-involved.
Clad in pajamas and a velvet cape, Morris swashbuckles like a geriatric Willie Wonka, torturing his children, bringing out the worst in them as they try to thwart his suicide. Of course the fatal finale gets rewritten into a love feast. Epiphanies pop like champagne corks. Everyone connects; everyone lives.
This is a film to see at home with a darling of any age — preferably not a member of the Hemlock Society. Gg
