Subtle Suspense by a Masterful Director

Rating: 9/10 (31 December 2006)

DeNiro's brilliant directing kept me spellbound. Matt Damon is riveting as Wilson, a character whose interior is knowable only through our identification with him, as he travels through a world of people who may or may not be what they seem. Almost every scene is exquisitely, truthfully rendered. The only phony notes: The timing of the news that Wilson has gotten Clover pregnant, brought to him when he is on the beach with Laura; also phony is the ability of deaf Laura to lipread words on lips that don't enunciate or are not even visible. This is not a film for those who must have lots of gore and flashy violence; it's hugely suspenseful but subtle. Someone once defined the difference between literary and commercial by saying that "commercial" featured large events, while "literary" had to do with the ramifications of those events. In that sense, DeNiro and Roth have given us a literary film about those who are in the business of espionage, a subject that is ordinarily rendered as slick and superficial. In a crowded theater, where there is a huge likelihood of people talking, there was absolute silence for the nearly three-hour length of this excellent movie.