Word: neill
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...Well, it turns out that a fellow named Eric O'Neill (Ryan Phillipe) got a pretty good idea about that pretty quickly. He was an ambitious young FBI trainee recruited by the counter-espionage team headed by Laura Linney's Kate Burroughs to be Hanssen's assistant and to mole his way into the wack-job's confidence. In the movie the kid is eager and innocent, and eventually becomes so obsessed with his prey that he is endangering his marriage to pretty, sensible Juliana (Caroline Dhavernas). For Hanssen is something more than the mere neat freak he first appears...
...Cooper's performance as this character is nothing short of astonishing: it encompasses a rigid posture, a snappish disposition and a careless contempt for agency protocol. One of the first things he does is send O'Neill out to steal a new computer from their colleagues down the hall. What begins to emerge, almost inferentially from Cooper's taciturn playing, is a portrait of a sharp knife nestled in drawer full of dull ones. A man this bright should have been on the bureau's fast track. Instead, he's on a side track, chugging along a bureaucratic road...
...despite knowing that he is in all probability a master spy, O'Neill is almost seduced by him against his will. The man's interest in developing the kid's seriously lapsed spiritual life may be a little creepy, but we see that it arises out of authentic concern. We also see that O'Neill can't help but admire a mentor who shows him how to game whatever system they're caught up in, can't help beginning to think that a good heart my be beating beneath his cheap gray suit. The beginnings of this surrogate father...
...audiences who come to the theater for feeling rather than anesthesia, for honesty rather than comfort, Broadway Bound should firmly establish Simon's standing in the top rank of American playwrights. He does not attempt to do what Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams and Sam Shepard have done: create their own worlds and mesmerize viewers into them. Simon evokes a world very much like the viewers' own and entices them into confronting their own feelings. Broadway Bound is the work of a master craftsman, at once literary and heartfelt, shaped with becoming modesty. It is unmistakably urban and Jewish...
...bigger error: selling the TV rights to The Odd Couple to Paramount when it made the movie, on the presumption that it would never become a series?a bad guess that Simon says may have cost him as much as $20 million. Later on he bought the Eugene O'Neill Theater on Broadway as a home for his plays. That had the unexpected result of making him the employer of his mother: she came to work on the box-office telephone ("Some mothers give you their milk, others sell tickets to Promises, Promises"). He later sold the theater?...