Late to the Party: Breach

Billy Ray, the writer-director of Breach and the excellent Shattered Glass, has already carved out a very specific niche for himself. His tightly-wound, politically-engaged movies - not quite meditative enough to be character studies, not quite quick-paced enough to count as thrillers - are shockingly well-crafted, but don't quite qualify as either box-office candy or Oscar-bait (although they should - but I'll get to that in a moment.)

Breach is a step-by-step recounting of the takedown of FBI mole Robert Hanssen (Chris Cooper), a computer and information expert who sells state secrets for over $1.4 million to the Russians over a 25-year period. It's told almost exclusively from the point of view of Eric O'Neill (Ryan Phillipe), an agent-in-training who is assigned by a superior (Laura Linney) to shadow Hanssen (under false pretenses) and gather information about his activities. The atmosphere of the movie is a ferocious bummer - half-lit D.C. skies, dank basement offices, fluorescent lights that make everyone look pale and mottled. As with Shattered Glass, Ray creates an atmosphere where mistrust sits like a sticky film on top of everything surrounding Hanssen.

One common problem between both of Ray's movies is a lead actor who can't quite rise to the level of the excellently-written material. Hayden Christensen struggled admirably against his characteristic blandness in Shattered Glass; as disgraced New Republic writer Stephen Glass, he came quite close to capturing a sense of relentless momentum in the face of moral unmooring. Phillipe doesn't fare quite so well. I like his choices as an actor, which have generally been bold and interesting, but here he's a bit blank. In numerous scenes he plays with Cooper, his covering-up lies are so confidently asserted that there isn't any sense of his character's fight to stay afloat in unstable waters.

Cooper, on the other hand, is a godsend. In his hands, Hanssen is as unsettling a cinematic creation as I've ever seen. The true story is more than enough material for any actor to work with - Hanssen was a fiercely conservative Catholic affiliated with Opus Dei, and a porn addict who filmed sexual encounters with his wife and sent them to his friends; a self-styled patriot given to pointing out his own self-abnegations in the service of his country, and an egomaniac willing to sell out secrets and livees in order to prove his own importance. In a lesser actor's hands, this would come off as a multiple-personality disorder. Cooper, though, swallows this toxic, contradictory brew, and never lets too much out. His contempt and resentment (and intelligence) are written across his lemon-puckered face.

In many ways, Breach will service not as a defining movie of the Cold War (where, indeed, Hanssen's worst violations occurred), but of the Bush administration. The landscape of cynical, gun-obsessed company men, sneering at the simpletons working below them, seems to me a richer evocation of the world seen through Dick Cheney's lenses than any straight recounting of that era could possibly give.

In Which Oskar Schindler Punches Foreigners

One of the truly interesting things about Taken, the new joint from Liam Neeson and the guy who made the much-lauded (but as-yet-still-unseen-by-me) French action flick District B-13, is that such a multi-national cast managed to make a movie so wholly rooted in the American tradition of xenophobic paranoia. Neeson plays a negligent ex-CIA dad looking to re-connect with his virginal, estranged daughter (Lost's Maggie Grace), who - in the quickly-dispensed-with exposition - is whisked off from L.A. to Paris by an imprudent friend, and promptly kidnapped (and sold to high-level international pimps) by gangsters of a suitably ominous and anonymous (Albanian!) national origin. Since he's both negligent and ridiculously over-protective, Neeson immediately applies his special CIA freaky-styley to the situation, combating a range of furners (ranging from corrupt French bureaucrats to the henchmen of Arab sheiks), slowly slicing, bashing, and shooting his way down to the guys at the top holding his daughter.

Already, we have a pretty potent array of awesome moral lessons to be taken from Taken:

1) Your shotgun-toting dad, who kept you under lock and key to preserve you from unexpected assaults on your fortress of chastity? Guess what? He was totally right!

2) Any highly-trained American operative has the wherewithal to best dozens of (presumably) moderately-trained brown-skinned sorts in hand-to-hand combat, and the wherewithal to escape unscathed and unarrested from the mayhem he's caused.

3) Torture totally works! (Incidentally, I just figured out what Taken really is: a condensation of the first season of 24! Really! Maggie Grace's character is named "Kim" and everything! How did they not notice this?!)

4) Lastly, do not travel, ever. Instead of heading for the dangers of Western Europe, you're better off staying in that famed idyll of security, Los Angeles.

Despite being regressive, ridiculous, and derivative, I am ashamed to admit that Taken - when taken on its own slightly-odious terms - works like gangbusters. The director, Pierre Morel, obviously knows his way around a heart-pounding, bone crunching flight scene. And Neeson's commitment to this nonsense elevates the movie to a level of quality it doesn't deserve; in this role, his humorlessness and his intensity counterbalance the film's profusion of absurdities. Even while the early expository scenes don't entirely work, the sight of Neeson standing uncomfortably at his daughter's ritzy SoCal birthday party perfectly conveys what's going on. With his unkempt hair, and his ostrich-like, oversized Piers Plowman frame, he projects a sense of being out of place - beyond looking lost amid the party's surface-obsessed excess, he looks like he's been beamed in from a more rigid, righteous historical era.