Film: Office Politics

FOUR years ago, the writer-director Billy Ray made a strange, transfixing little movie called Shattered Glass, about The New Republic’s famous fabricator, Stephen Glass. A scandal at a Washington political magazine seemed, on its face, the least cinematic subject imaginable, but somehow Ray turned out a film that was not only a pitch-perfect portrait of an unctuous climber’s fall from grace, but a careful, almost anthropological look at the peculiar, rivalrous culture of twentysomething D.C. journalism, where everyone’s a friend and everyone’s a competitor, and false modesty is the coin of the realm. Shattered Glass offered a perfect dramatic counterpoint, in a way, to the comedic brilliance of a comic strip like Dilbert or a television show like The Office, mining the working world’s idiosyncrasies and anxieties for tension and trauma instead of belly laughs.

Now Ray is back with another Washington workplace drama, and this time he’s after bigger game-instead of a twentysomething fabulist, there’s a fiftysomething traitor, the FBI turncoat Robert Hanssen, and instead of a magazine’s reputation, there’s America’s national security at stake. But Breach, which has a glowering Chris Cooper as Hanssen and Ryan Phillippe as the FBI trainee assigned to monitor him, is ultimately concerned with the same issues as Shattered Glass: the ambitions and resentments of office life, and how they shape the trajectory of a single, particularly pathological career. Ray’s earlier movie turned on an editor’s suspicions of his charming-but-smarmy subordinate; this one turns on a subordinate’s suspicions of his gruff-but-likeable boss. The earlier film depicted a talented employee who went astray because he became addicted to praise and favor from his superiors; Breach depicts a talented employee who turned traitor because he was smarter than his superiors, and never got the credit he deserved.

About the Author

Ross Douthat

Ross Douthat is a former National Review contributing editor.

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FOUR years ago, the writer-director Billy Ray made a strange, transfixing little movie called Shattered Glass, about The New Republic’s famous fabricator, Stephen Glass. A scandal at a Washington political magazine seemed, on its face, the least cinematic subject imaginable, but somehow Ray turned out a film that was not only a pitch-perfect portrait of an unctuous climber’s fall from grace, but a careful, almost anthropological look at the peculiar, rivalrous culture of twentysomething D.C. journalism, where everyone’s a friend and everyone’s a competitor, and false modesty is the coin of the realm. Shattered Glass offered a perfect dramatic counterpoint, in a way, to the comedic brilliance of a comic strip like Dilbert or a television show like The Office, mining the working world’s idiosyncrasies and anxieties for tension and trauma instead of belly laughs.

Now Ray is back with another Washington workplace drama, and this time he’s after bigger game-instead of a twentysomething fabulist, there’s a fiftysomething traitor, the FBI turncoat Robert Hanssen, and instead of a magazine’s reputation, there’s America’s national security at stake. But Breach, which has a glowering Chris Cooper as Hanssen and Ryan Phillippe as the FBI trainee assigned to monitor him, is ultimately concerned with the same issues as Shattered Glass: the ambitions and resentments of office life, and how they shape the trajectory of a single, particularly pathological career. Ray’s earlier movie turned on an editor’s suspicions of his charming-but-smarmy subordinate; this one turns on a subordinate’s suspicions of his gruff-but-likeable boss. The earlier film depicted a talented employee who went astray because he became addicted to praise and favor from his superiors; Breach depicts a talented employee who turned traitor because he was smarter than his superiors, and never got the credit he deserved.