The things that men count for happiness, seeking The good deeds that lead to obscurity, accepting With equal face those that bring ignominy, The applause of all or the love of none. All men are ready to invest their money But most expect dividends. — T.S. Eliot, "Choruses from The Rock"
The best performance you'll see all year is not, alas, Helen Mirren's in The Queen but Chris Cooper's in Breach. The story of Robert Hanssen, captured in 2001 as the longest and most destructive Soviet spy operating with the United States (and within its oldest bureau of intelligence), has got to be one of the most fascinating psychological case studies tricked out as popular culture.
Hanssen was a member of Opus Dei and a sexual deviant (he'd film himself and his wife, without her knowledge, and send copies to internet chums around the world), who evidently was "turned" by Moscow Central in 1984 for reasons that are still unknown, or ambiguous at any rate. The film and Cooper's electrifying performance suggest that Hanssen suffered from a paradoxical condition of megalomania fused with an inferiority complex. He thought he was the smartest guy in the room (most of the time, he was) and that he, not the FBI or American cause in the cold war, which he singlehandedly undermined from within, was being stifled right up to the end. Hell hath no fury like the loser who never got a corner office.
What leads a cracked personality to such extremes? Ron Rosenbaum, who has written brilliantly on the conspiracy theory-bathed demimonde of espionage, has a post about this at his blog:
Selling out the lives of our agents in the KGB. For cash, not conviction.
It offers us something that we rarely see in films: non transparency. Someone who is not clear even to himself. Someone who is an apparently sincere devout Catholic who becomes a traitor for…merely money? For ego? So that he “matters”. He is essentially a multiple murderer; the information that he passed to the Soviets led to at least three deaths perhaps many more. And yet he goes about his business grimly but methodically. It’s haunting, chilling. In a way he reminds one of the kidnapper/murderer in the original Dutch version of The Vanishing. We don’t understand him because he doesn’t understand himself, and this is what touches on a nerve and makes the performance great.
T.S. Eliot is really Kafka baptized. However, the poet's eschatological symbolism applies with added weight to Hanssen, who may have navigated a fluorescent-lit labyrinth of bureaucracy his whole professional life, but was the last of the 20th century hollow men: a simulacrum of the pious good citizen waiting around for the world to end. Betraying his country came easy.