THE 'MASTER SPY' WHO BORED ME.

Byline: David Kronke Television Critic

Occasionally, you can detect the flaws in a film from the filmmakers' professed perspective, and CBS' four-hour miniseries ``Master Spy: The Robert Hanssen Story'' is one of those cases. In the film's production notes, screenwriter Norman Mailer proclaims that Hanssen - who pretended to be staunchly religious, yet wined and dined a stripper; who insisted he loved his wife, yet sent nude pictures of her to a friend and even apparently suggested they sleep together; who declared his patriotism yet sold top-secret information to an avowed enemy - ``managed to keep his sanity.''

Hanssen - who dispensed secrets to the Soviet Union, then Russia, for 25 years before being discovered - was clearly a bizarre control freak who frequently and hypocritically stepped way over normal boundaries. You only need to survey Mailer's biography to get an idea of what ``keeping one's sanity'' means to him.

The rest of us are left with this utterly flawed and protracted docudrama starring a woefully miscast William Hurt, whose persistent simpering as Hanssen suggests he could barely string together a pair of compellingly rendered sentences, let alone befog American intelligence for more than two decades.

``I love order,'' Hurt says early on tonight as Hanssen. ``I worship it.'' This is intended as heavy-handed foreboding, as is his purchase of a gun (the same kind that James Bond uses) and his enthusiasm for a movie in which the villain must leave clues, because otherwise his crimes are too easy.

At the same time, he's haunted by cliched voices in his head - ``You're a loser - you'll never amount to anything!'' his dad (Peter Boyle) derisively barks at him. Hanssen, in times of moral crisis, addresses himself before bathroom mirrors: ``There's no way out - I have to continue with the Soviets,'' he opines, and later he queries, ``Can I continue to go to confession without mentioning my work as a spy? Yes.''

Mailer and director Lawrence Schiller - who previously hacked out exploitative miniseries on JonBenet Ramsey and O.J. Simpson - insist that evidence suggests Hanssen may actually have addressed his bathroom mirror in such a fashion. So what? It's a hoary, idiotic narrative device that feels wholly false in the context of this film.

Besides, Schiller and Mailer not only fail to convincingly essay Hanssen's moral quandaries, they utterly overlook the internal lives of key peripheral characters in this saga. Hanssen's wife Bonnie (Mary-Louise Parker) is reduced to an insulting stereotype - there's no effort to define her life between the time she first discovered her husband selling secrets to the Soviet Union in 1979 and his subsequent arrest 22 years later.

And despite the queasy sexual subtexts Hanssen shared with his best pal Jack (David Straithairn) and a stripper (Hilit Pace, whose engaging turn suggests more about her character than the script ever bothers to), nothing in the film begins to explain what accounts for their tricky, ultimately disquieting fates.

Tonight, character revelations that aren't hinted at before emerge at random, resulting in storytelling that seems borderline incoherent. Hurt's trademark druggy, arrhythmic line readings don't so much suggest a crack FBI agent as a crack-addled one, one who wouldn't slip through intelligence cracks for a quarter of a century.

Parker, too, offers up a performance considerably beneath her talents, though Mailer's script doesn't encourage much in the way of subtlety. Straithairn, one of Hollywood's most underrated character actors, is similarly wasted. There's potentially a compelling story in Hanssen's saga; this, alas, ain't it by a country mile.

MASTER SPY: THE ROBERT HANSSEN STORY - One and one half stars

What: Docudrama starring William Hurt as a mild-mannered Fed who sold key secrets to the Russians.

Where: CBS (Channel 2).

When: 9 tonight and Nov. 17.

In a nutshell: Overlong and under-interesting.