A slow, excellent effort by De Niro and his cast.

Rating: 10/10 (27 December 2006)

After seeing almost no movies in 2006, there are a half-dozen coming out within the last two weeks that I'm interested in seeing ("Rocky Balboa" being the most surprising entry on the list). I just got back from a showing of "The Good Shepherd", Robert De Niro's second directorial effort. He's apparently been developing this for a while, and has roped in a pretty impressive cast, even for small roles (he even managed to smoke Joe Pesci out of the self-imposed exile he's been on since the last "Lethal Weapon" film).
The film follows Edward Wilson (Matt Damon) from 1939, when he is inducted into the Skull & Bones Society at Yale, and then enlisted by General Sullivan (De Niro himself) to serve in the OSS during World War II, until 1961, in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Through Wilson, we see the founding of the CIA, the Cold War with the KGB, and the disintegration of Wilson's shotgun-marriage (albeit to Angelina Jolie) under the stress. There's the typical "honest patriot discovers how ugly things are" story, but, unlike many spy films, the film never gets into a debate about whether or not all this is really necessary; the tone is clinical, as in, this is how is happens, and this is how it affects people.
Performancewise, Damon is good as the central character, but he's a pretty tightly-wound character (think Jeffrey Wright in "Syriana"), so he's not really that emotive (this keeps things from getting excessively maudlin, although it also lends itself to criticism that the character's emotional arc isn't especially evident) (although he does dress up like a woman and play "Buttercup" in Gilbert & Sullivan's 'HMS Pinafore'). As in a lot of movies, the supporting cast contains all the live wires: Jolie, obviously, although she's in a fairly traditional role (put-upon wife), even if her early scenes give her a lot more fire than is often the case; John Turturro, as Damon's associate/subordinate throughout his career, who is also notable as the only spy in the film who ever raises his voice that much (when beating up a would-be defector); and, in my favourite performance, Tammy Blanchard as Laura, Edward's first girlfriend, who comes to represent the life he might have had if he hadn't joined the CIA. The movie's best scene comes when Edward and Laura are on the beach, shortly before Pearl Harbour; Edward had just been seduced by Margaret (Jolie's character), in a rather bizarre scene, but still loves Laura; then, Margaret's brother arrives and Edward goes to speak with him, and is told that Margaret is pregnant; now Laura is deaf, but she's lip-read the whole conversation from a distance, and just dejectedly walks away before Edward can say anything.
To be clear, this isn't a happy movie, but it's a very good one.