With his follow-up to Shattered Glass, director Billy Ray has made a good start on a pet theme, the human, or peculiarly American, proclivity for deceit. The first, you will recall, told the factual story of the fabricating journalist, Stephen Glass, of The New Republic. This second tells the factual story of the dissembling FBI double agent, Robert Hanssen, the bureau's self-styled expert on the Soviets and secret bedfellow of them, the architect of "the worst breach in the history of U.S. intelligence," in the intemperate words of the colleague commissioned to seal the breach. The factuality cuts two ways. It curbs the extravagances of the James Bond branch of espionage capers, but it also curbs the excitement, the thrills. With the traitor's arrest a foregone conclusion (a preludial clip of John Ashcroft on television provides reassurance rather than, more usually for a member of the Bush administration, an invitation to hiss), the film becomes more a character study than a cloak-and-dagger operation; and because of the nature of the character -- a devout and ostentatious Catholic (lapsed Lutheran), a vigilant paranoid, a humorless megalomaniac, a pompous pontificator, a private pervert -- it devolves into an accumulation of oddities and crotchets, inescapably more mirthful than suspenseful. We can never really understand the man, but we can revel in him. Chris Cooper, Ryan Phillippe, Laura Linney, Kathleen Quinlan, Gary Cole, Dennis Haysbert. (2007) — Duncan Shepherd