Breach

Chris Cooper has a face that could slow a clock. In the happiest of times his expressions range, at a measured pace, from thoughtful through meditative to mournful. In Billy Ray's thriller Breach, he's got very little to be happy about. He plays Robert Hanssen, a tortured and devious FBI agent who was a spy for the Soviet Union. Hanssen was arrested in 2001, and won the dubious distinction of being the most notorious turncoat in the bureau's history. The movie is serious, intelligent, intentionally claustrophobic and awfully

somber - you may remember it in black and white, though it was shot in color (by the masterful Tak Fujimoto). But you'll remember Cooper's performance for exactly what it is, an uncompromising study in the gradual decay of a soul.

The Mask of Zorro and Entrapment. It seems to be a whimsical comment on the cat-and-mouse plot, but in fact Hanssen was convinced that his wife was a Catherine Zeta-Jones lookalike.) As trust grows between the two men, so does the shrewdness of O'Neill's spy craft. He's an interesting character in his turn, despite some clumsiness in the

writing, and Ryan Phillipe more than holds his own in a film that's inevitably dominated by the older actor.

Shattered Glass, and that was also an entrapment thriller. The quarry was Stephen Glass, a serial prevaricator who dazzled readers of The New Republic in the 1990's with reporting pieces that had everything going for them except truth. The filmmaker's touch in that one was light; he got off on the crazy enthusiasm of his scribbler subject. The doomy subject of Breach has dictated a different style that I don't readily respond- deliberate pace, meaningful scowls,

encroaching shadows. Still, Chris Cooper makes the movie worthwhile. He's a dark star in a contracting universe.