The Poor Little Lamb Who Has Lost His Way ...

Rating: 4/10 (18 January 2007)

THE GOOD SHEPHERD is a story that has been told before, in many guises. Director Robert DeNiro and screenwriter Eric Roth attempt to disguise the story by draping it in cloak-and-dagger attire, but going undercover doesn't hide the basic narrative at all. It is the story of a man who places his devotion to his career over his duties as a family man, all the while destroying the family even as he intends to protect it. The pretense that the film is a layer by layer revelation of the history of the CIA doesn't accentuate, but distracts from the human drama, and only unnecessarily pads the film with details that are sometimes fascinating and sometimes just cliché.
Matt Damon plays the fictional Edward Wilson, and the story follows this character's youthful days of semi-innocence to his rise as the head of the CIA, culminating with the Bay of Pigs incident in the early 1960's. Damon plays the part quite well, but it is a performance of determined emptiness and shallow emotion. That is, of course, the point of the character, but it is also the fatal flaw of both the role and the film. It is hard to care about someone who finds it hard to care. And like Edward, the story strays so far away, and for so long, from his family, that the emotional impact is greatly muted.
The human drama is almost like bookends: we learn about how he gets sucked into marriage at the beginning and how his family gets sucked into his professional web of intrigue at the end. But for the bulk of the movie we seem to check into his family life just to let us know they are still around. And when the story does circle back around to Edward's relationship with his son, Edward Jr. (played by Eddie Redmayne), it all seems greatly rushed, with key moments edited out. It's like DeNiro looked at his watch and finally realized he had dallied too long on the cool spy stuff and had to make a mad dash to get home on time. Plus, the ponderous espionage trickery throughout only serves to make the sudden twists, turns and revelations made at the end appear to be unnecessarily contrived.
The film is carefully made and DeNiro has a good eye for the camera, there's nothing too showy or too overly dramatic. And his ability to assemble a strong cast that includes Angelina Jolie, William Hurt, Billy Crudup, Timothy Hutton, John Turturro and others, certainly doesn't hurt. But the film's lack of focus leads everything astray. I suppose Edward Sr.'s descent into joyless isolation as a human being is supposed to mirror the CIA's journey from noble cause to sinister depths, and that is all well and good as far as it goes. But, ironically, by the time the film ends amid the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs mess, the message seems to be not that his career has harmed his family, but that his family has harmed his career. Like Edward, the film doesn't have its priorities straight.