long but involving drama

Rating: 8/10 (10 January 2007)

Robert De Niro's second directorial effort "The Good Shepherd" purports to tell the story of the birth of the CIA during the heyday of the Cold War. Based very loosely on the lives of two intelligence officers, James Jesus Angleton and Richard M. Bissell Jr., the movie is a strong but patience-demanding work that will have some members of the audience sitting up in rapt attention while others squirm restlessly in their seats. At 168 minutes and with little real action to speak of, "The Good Shepherd" is admittedly not the easiest sell for a mass audience, relying as it does on atmosphere and dialogue - and the patient goodwill of its viewers - to get its message across. I can easily imagine a person watching this film with one eye planted firmly on his wristwatch and the other on the theater exit. I'm happy to report that I was not one of those people, for despite a few longueurs that occur towards the end of the movie, I found this film to be both compelling and eminently watchable for most of its duration.
Matt Damon, who ages remarkably little throughout the 23-year time span covered by the story, plays Edward Bell Wilson, an agent specializing in the fine art of counterintelligence. With a screenplay by Eric Roth, the movie uses as its framing device the Bay of Pigs fiasco in the spring of 1961 and the suspicion that a mole in the agency must have tipped the Cubans off as to the American government's plan of invasion. From there we flash back to 1939 where we meet Wilson as a student at Yale recruited by the FBI to perform surveillance on a poetry professor with possible ties to the then-burgeoning Nazi Party. From then on, the film traces the arc of Wilson's life as he gets rooked into a largely loveless marriage (if one can call having to marry Angelina Jolie being "rooked"), trains as an agent with British Intelligence and then the O.S.S., then helps to lay the groundwork for the American "peace time" organization known as the C.I.A. The movie cuts back and forth between the two different time periods with only a few moments of confusion evident along the way.
Wilson is probably the most button-downed, completely internalized character to hit the screen since Heath Ledger's Ennis del Mar in "Brokeback Mountain" (though the character here is not nearly as fully realized as that one was). Wilson is a man almost totally devoid of humor and emotions - in many ways, the ideal person for the life of commitment and loneliness that spy work, by its very nature, demands. Wilson barely cracks a smile throughout the course of the story, and he is so thoroughly absorbed in his work that he doesn't see his wife and young son for literally years at a stretch. Wilson is surely one of the least audience-friendly of recent movie protagonists - or at least he would be if Damon did not convey the sort of puppy-dog vulnerability that actually makes us care about the character. Despite the fact that we know he has dedicated his life to a cause that he considers worthwhile and noble, we have a hard time approving of the way he treats his wife and family. Yet, Damon is able so show us that Wilson is not all that crazy about himself either and that he would lead a different life if only he were able to crawl out of his own skin and start all over. But this he cannot do, so he remains locked in his fate, true to what he knows how to do and hoping for a little redemption at the end if the gods should deem him worthy of that blessing. Damon plays his cards so close to the vest that he makes us continually re-evaluate the character without ever revealing more than we need to know about him. Wilson may at times be taking stock of his life, but the filmmakers don't feel the need to blatantly spell all the details out for us. It's in what's going on BEHIND those bespectacled eyes that the true drama lies.
The movie does not shy away from the ugly realities of life as a CIA agent, showing us the cold-blooded ruthlessness and mounting paranoia that come with any life built, as this one is, on deception and distrust.
Rather than aiming his film at the action crowd, De Niro has decided to focus on the characters and dialogue and simply hope that his audience will follow along with him. As a director, he brings a quiet, subdued tone to the story, the better to match the persona of his main character. In order to create a mood of contrasting emotions, cinematographer Robert Richardson uses a dull palette for the scenes set in the present, and a glowing, sepia-toned look for those set in the past.
De Niro has assembled a veritable who's who of Hollywood's biggest and brightest to flesh out the minor roles - William Hurt, Alec Baldwin, Billy Crudup, Timothy Hutton, John Turturro, Joe Pesci, even De Niro himself - but, frankly, their parts are so limited that none truly stands out, thus clearing the way for Damon to take center stage. Jolie has rarely looked so dreamily beautiful before, but even her screen time is too minimal for her to make more than a glancing impact on the film as a whole (it's hard to believe any man would be as callously indifferent to the Jolie charm as Damon is here, but then, hey, that's Hollywood).
This is clearly Damon's film and he proves once again that acting does not need to be "theatrical" and "showy" to be effective. His performance is the glue that holds this long, potentially unwieldy film together.