Heavy Handed Failure

Rating: 4/10 (3 January 2007)

Ralph Rosenblum, who edited Annie Hall, writes in his memoir that one of the scenes that wound up on the cutting room floor had Woody Allen fantasizing about his parents being WASPs like the Halls instead of immigrant Brooklyn Jews. His father asks his mother for a martini, and she says, "Of course. How would you like it, dear." He replies, "On white bread with mayonnaise." That about sums up De Niro's view of the emotionally closed WASP characters in this movie. Scorsese could have made a masterpiece out of this material. De Niro is both tone deaf and resentful.
The key passage is the only point in the movie that Damon's character shows any emotion or reveals what he thinks about his work. He is trying to enlists the help of an old Mafia don, played by Joe Pesci, against Castro. Pesci says to him, " We've got family. The Irish have the homeland. The Jews have their tradition. Even the n*****s have their music. What have you people got?" Damon replies, in a cold and priggish tone, "We have the United States of America. The rest of you people are just visiting." That's De Niro's perspective: these arrogant snobs, who actually weren't very good at their work, believed that they owned the country as their birthright. It's too simplistic.
De Niro is very clear that these gentleman spies were failures. Damon's career at the CIA is presented as a succession of blunders and blown operations, culminating in the Bay of Pigs. He is consistently manipulated and duped by his Soviet counterpart. A man who is personally and professionally suspicious of everyone, the only two people he trusts are a Soviet defector who is a plant and a British agent, modeled on Philby, who is working for the Russians. Both, of course, betray him. The movie ends in 1961 with Damon getting promoted in the post-Bay of Pigs shake up, but we the audience know that defeat in Vietnam is on its way.
Regardless of its politics, the movie doesn't work as a movie. Damon doesn't age plausibly from 20 year old Yale junior to 42 year old CIA apparatchik; in the 1961 sequences he looks like a teenager costumed as Robert McNamara for Halloween. The sequence in which Angelina Jolie drags him into the woods and jumps his bones within hours of meeting him seems grossly unmotivated -- nice girls of that class simply didn't behave that way in 1940. The only plausible explanation I've heard is that she was already pregnant by an unsuitable boyfriend and needed to pin it on a marriageable dupe, but there's no support or confirmation in the movie. Too many characters rear back and make moralizing speeches. The plot unfolds with absolute predictability, and the key revelation is telegraphed. Most importantly, there is no catharsis. The crisis of the movie plays utterly flat. We get no sense of Damon's inner life and no sense that his experience has done anything but numb him. It's a long way from Michael Corleone at the lake house, and its a long, uninvolving 150 minutes.
In an odd way, The Good Shepherd reminds me of The Truman Show. Damon's life is a pattern of manipulation by forces that he doesn't understand -- from his recruitment to the OSS, to his shotgun wedding, to the way his Soviet opposite number sets him up like a bowling pin. In particular, the displacement of his true love by the woman whom he must marry if he is to pursue the destiny imposed on him is an almost direct parallel to the way Laura Linney is plopped into Jim Carey's lap. Unlike Truman, he never figures it out.