"Friends can be enemies, and enemies friends."

Rating: 9/10 (12 August 2019)

The most surprising aspect of this story was the skillful direction of Robert De Niro, tackling a chronologically non-linear script to tell the story of a covert agency department head from his rise to prominence in the CIA, and the failure of the agency's ill fated invasion of Cuba to topple Fidel Castro in April of 1961. The way it's told here is speculative and fictional, though based on real live events just prior to and subsequent to the election of John F. Kennedy as President of the United States. William Hurt as Philip Allen for example, appears to be a stand-in for Allen Dulles, Director of Central Intelligence, who was drummed out of the CIA for the failure at the Bay of Pigs. And I didn't know if I should have been surprised with the appearance of Joe Pesci as Mafia chieftain, Joseph Palmi. He would have represented Sam Giancana, head of a Chicago crime family who even as a vicious criminal, was devotedly patriotic and went to the extreme of funding his own private war on Castro while providing intelligence to the government through his intermediaries. It's been reliably established that Kennedy gave the go ahead for gangster involvement to overthrow Castro through various cut outs, and one of the theories on the leak that informed Castro's forces to thwart the invasion was a Cuban intermediary who was acting as a double agent! Those details can be found in the compelling book by Thomas Maier, "Mafia Spies: The Inside Story of the CIA, Gangsters, JFK and Castro". If anything, it's even more riveting than this film.
There were only a couple things about this picture that distracted me a bit. Matt Damon's portrayal of CIA department head Edward Wilson seemed entirely too one-dimensional and cold. There would ordinarily be times, I would think, that a guy in his position would be able to lighten up a bit, but his approach to work and family was entirely one-sided. The other was the reaction of Laura (Tammy Blanchard) when Wilson made his re-acquaintance with her more than a decade after leaving her high and dry as a lover. Her reaction was very accommodating, and it didn't really feel right to me.
But everything to do with the game of spy versus spy was quite convincing, and illustrated to what lengths the CIA and it's Russian counterpart would go to in order to deceive and deflect attention from the real and the unreal. It became so complex over the course of Edward Wilson's life and career, that his own father's advice to him as a young man would surely come back to haunt him - "If you lie to your friends, they won't trust you".