Great film - still thinking about it and sorting it out

Rating: 8/10 (19 July 2008)

I would guess I'm not the only person to have trouble sorting out the twists and turns of a spy film's plot - the layers of betrayal, to be convincing enough to keep even veteran spies in doubt, have to be very confusing. As such, the morning after, I've got these questions. The IMDb reviews have helped with some.
1) Is William Hurt's Phil Allen character, apparently based loosely on Allen Dulles, guilty of embezzling money? guilty of taking money from the Soviets? or merely guilty of financial indiscretions which make him susceptible to blackmail? Dulles' financial issues are an interesting footnote to history - that he and his brother as lawyers represented American firms deeply invested in Germany after World War I and remaining so in Nazi Germany but with several layers of financial secrecy through Swiss banks and business fronts - but there has been no suggestions that his loyalty was compromised.
2)Who is Ulysses? Is he a KGB spymaster, or a highly placed KGB spy in the Western spy apparatus? 3)Getting away from plot to character for a moment, Angelina Jolie's character, Wilson's wife Clover/Margaret, rings untrue in one way. She meets him as a wild, beautiful, rich girl seemingly luring him into a sexual liaison because she's expected to find a husband from the right social class and feels pressed to do so as the war threatens to take most eligible men away. I have trouble translating her into the unhappy, drunk, passive wife and mother that lives uncomfortably with him for another 15 years after the war. Far more likely is the suggestion dangled early on when Wilson calls on the phone from occupied Berlin and hears his young son let slip that she's going out with someone, planting the suspicion in his mind that she's being unfaithful, and he retaliates by allowing himself to be drawn into a fling with his translator. The plot uses this to show that this was a onetime thing on her part, and meanwhile Wilson himself allows himself to be compromised when the translator turns out to be a Russian spy. But I would find it more convincing to believe that Clover isn't a girl to suffer the lack of male company for very long, and to have left him for another man by the war's end. I also can't see where the wild girl disappears to. This is unconvincing.
4)I didn't realize until late in the movie that Wilson's Russian counterpart was not, himself, the (fake) defector. I'm not too good with faces. But I thought that was the basis for Wilson's trust in the defector.
5)With the rapid crosscutting between scenes and time periods, and little change in Wilson's appearance to help signal the changes, I was initially confused over the thread - a hair? a violin string? an antenna? - found in the book, was found on his own desk or that of the (fake) defector whom Wilson in the adjoining scenes is confronting in the man's home late one night.
6)I had some trouble separating out the fellow Bonesmen - the guy who talks Wilson into staying in Bones following the humiliating initiation scene and who Wilson follows up the ranks at the CIA, vs. Clover's brother who is killed in World War II, vs. the Senator (her father?), etc.
7)Wilson's ethnic remark to Pesci's character, seemingly meant to be emblematic of WASP bigotry, isn't convincing. Pesci's Joey Prima mobster character is in Wilson's face a bit, busting his balls about his ethnicity. I just see the usually buttoned up Wilson letting loose for a moment to give it right back to him. The scene is still worthwhile dramatically, though, as Wilson gets to witness the close-knit nature of Prima's family, as Prima bickers with his daughter about taking good care of his grandchildren at the beach.
8)At Yale, the word was that it was Scroll and Key, not Skull and Bones, that had the inside track at the State Department and the CIA.
9)Some reviewers see Turturro's character as brutal. Only in one scene is he portrayed as slapping around someone during an interrogation, and the stakes are pretty high when he does. There is no groundwork to suggest that he has a brutal streak in his nature. I find his character's most important function as to highlight the unfair ethnic-class structure at the time. The character is older than Wilson at the outset and also a college graduate, but merely a noncom because he's Catholic and Italian.
There were tons I loved about this movie. Its examination of the conflicting loyalties to country, family, school, secret society and job, and the toll this takes over a lifetime, is formidable. I think its period scenes of 1930s Yale and the Skull and Bones milieu are excellent. I think, however, that the book "The Company" (more than the TV miniseries based on it)does a better job covering the same material with the same themes while rendering it far less confusing.
My questions about this are not a reflection of the film's flaws, rather of my own obtuseness and the film's subtlety. I probably need to watch it again.