Guy de Fraumeni’s Hollywood In The Hamptons

Breach
&
Music and Lyrics

Did ya ever notice how some men and women in the acting business can have movies made for them, and others who make the movie? A case in point for an actor making a movie is terrific actor, Chris Cooper (already accredited with his 2002 Oscar for Adaptation), and his award-insisting performance in Breach. I don’t mean to belittle the film – itself a finely tuned subtle thriller – however, it owes its chilling tang to Cooper’s surly, bitter-taut characterization of a pious FBI agent who sold key information to the Soviets so easily for 20 years. Spying for the Communists was very profitable and made him a 1.4-millionaire capitalist.

Portraying counterintelligence agent Robert Philip Hanssen must have presented a challenge to Mr. Cooper. Outwardly, Hanssen was as blandly uptight and colorless as the florescent lighting that illuminates the FBI’s bureaucratic, undigested systems. Cooper miraculously registers Hanssen’s bellyache-without- bellyaching stoicism with pure middleclass covertness. For someone like Hanssen, who might have been insane (he told the Soviets that he suspected as much), no one considered his treasonous sideline. He was a good worker. He attended church frequently and gave his assistants hell. He drove a Ford Taurus and delivered the “goods” (KGB agents-turned-moles) in a black garbage bag. He hated the Godlessness of the old Soviet Union. Was this guy strange? The first crack in Hanssen’s bland façade was the leak of his quirky sex life (adding a voyeuristic zing to marital monotony with videotapes). I’m not sure how much sex there was, but there were plenty of lies.

The film’s director, Billy Ray, has the FBI sending Hanssen a new assistant in order to secretly monitor his actions, as Hanssen’s sexual perversions could be embarrassing to the FBI. The assistant, who is neatly played by Ryan Phillippe, takes Hanssen’s abuse even while he’s treated as a member of Hanssen’s family. Both actors make the office cat and mouse game a nail-biter. Director Ray is very well remembered for his breakout film, Shattered Glass, with its similar treatment of pathological deceit. In that film, a young reporter writes articles that are totally fabricated. Why? The director gives no reasons then and he doesn’t give them in Breach, either. Of course, there’s always the fallback reason – because they could.

And how about the stars that have movies made for them? Hugh Grant is one of these. Story ideas are pushed at him hourly and, if one should stick to his fancy, its maker will tailor it to his charm-guaranteed persona. Music and Lyrics is one of those fits-like-a-glove vehicles for Grant. He’s working with writer-director Marc Lawrence, who sewed up his successful Two Weeks Notice so neatly, then padded some manliness into his shoulders by pairing him with feisty Sandra Bullock. That bit of muscle is left out of Music and Lyrics. Hugh plays the music half of the title, a faded 1980s pop star that has been reduced to the nostalgic no-man’s-land of amusement park stages and high school reunions. With a big chance to write a song for a teenage star (a retro ditty, of course) he decides that he can do the music, but what about the words? Luckily, a professional plant-waterer with a flair for nouns, verbs and prepositions steps in. As charming as Hugh, she’s sunny-lovely Drew Barrymore and she can help him, though she can do with some assistance herself. So, no Sandra Bullock roughing up in this film. Ladies, you can bring your boyfriends to the show with no problems, as there’s no chance of their feeling threatened. With Drew as the lyrics half, the music they make is as sweet as the bubblegum tunes done by Hugh’s old teenybopper band called PoP. In Music and Lyrics, Hugh gets to shake his booty and sing. It’s very entertaining. He sings with his usual self-deprecating mannerisms that work best when given a whiff of “I’m such a brilliantly awful person.”

The joke is never on him, because he never comes on to anyone – male or female. He makes you throw yourself at him. That’s why producers want to make movies for him. In interviews for the film’s opening he said that he doesn’t do “preambles.” He asked, “what was your delicious word?” The reporter suggested, “foreplay?” “Yes,” he said. “I never do that.”

Holy mackerel! That’s all he does and, it isn’t easy.

Guy-Jean de Fraumeni is the producer/writer/director of award-winning European and American feature films. He has been a judge at Major Film and TV award competitions, including the Oscars, the Emmy’s and various film festivals. Sarah Halsey assists him.