Lack of Compelling Storyline Sinks This Masterpiece Manquee

Rating: 7/10 (24 December 2006)

"The Good Shepered" is excellent in so many ways it will frustrate viewers hungry for intelligent, adult film-making.
Matt Damon gives an unforgettable performance as the very cold American spy Edward Wilson.
Wilson makes Mr. Spock look like Zorba the Greek. Damon faced the same challenge that actors who play corpses face. I think he flashes his Matt Damon grin exactly once in the film's entire two-hour-plus runtime. Damon can simulate sex with Angelina Jolie without a flicker of heat melting one feature of his frozen face. This man may be the solution to Global Warming.
John Turturro crackles as an Italian American who verbally jousts with Yale snob Wilson when they first meet. Joe Pesci is a completely believable Mafia boss in one brief scene and in one brief observation about ethnicity in America. Alec Baldwin, William Hurt, Robert De Niro and Michael Gambon are solid gold, as ever.
Billy Crudup is scrupulously refined, and deadly, as a Kim Philby-like traitor. Tammy Blanchard is poignant as a deaf woman who truly loves. Eddy Redmayne is even more poignant as a sheep among wolves; I wanted to rush on screen and rescue him.
Angelina Jolie is a famous celebrity; you see her face on supermarket tabloids a lot. Whenever she appears on screen here as an obedient, frustrated wife, you think to yourself, "But, Angelina would never do that." And that's the problem with her "acting." The production values are sky high. You've got your vintage cars, your recreation of Skull and Bones retreats. You've got big issues: imperialism, espionage, the price of victory, loyalty, betrayal.
What you don't have is story. We care about movies, plays, and novels, and they get us to think about big ideas, because there is a story there, a boat, to glide us over everything else -- the characters, the details, the historical lessons.
Robert De Niro may be an artist, but he isn't, not in this movie, anyway, a story teller. You sense this right away. The first few scenes are a disconnected jumble. You really have to struggle to find a thread to follow.
The movie doesn't give us anyone to like or root for, or any tragedy to mourn. The movie doesn't know the answer to one key question: did Edward start out so cold, and did circumstance exploit his coldness, or did his life as a spy, to which he was recruited by more powerful others, make him cold? Compare this movie to masterpieces like "Lawrence of Arabia" or "The Searchers." Like "Shepherd," these films depict disturbed characters acting out their part against huge historical canvases. The key difference: both these films start and end with story, and were made by master storytellers. They don't ask you to *think* about imperialism or racism or destiny until they've seduced you to *care* about, and identify with, Lawrence, or Ethan.
"The Good Shepherd" wants to throw a lot of essay material at you: privilege, power, war -- and it rejects your involvement as callously as the main character himself rejects someone who loves him.
As much as this movie wants to be an intelligent movie, its choice to reject story and character as primary, and cogitation as only, ever the fruit of story, was ultimately, not very intelligent.