An important movie that only partly accomplishes its mission

Rating: Null/10 (23 December 2006)

Robert DeNiro's "The Good Shepherd" may or may not be an accurate look at the early days of the CIA. But it deserves a chance with movie goers because it does at least make an effort to tear the veil away from America's mostly secret intelligence community.
The story that it tells centers around a young man played by Matt Damon who is recruited for the spy agency right out of college just before the onset of WWII and follows his career, though flashbacks, up through the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
While the film works well as history, it is less successful as a piece of cinema because of some choices it makes. One assumes the "Good Shepherd" title is supposed to describe a selfless individual who sacrifices his personal happiness for the good of his country. In order to do this, he pretty much walls himself up emotionally. Such could be one of the realities of the spy business, but unfortunately, watching an emotionally constipated man slog through a nearly three hour movie is not necessarily the most exciting of experiences.
One wonders, in fact, if you could have told the exact same story, but made the fictional protagonist a lot more demonstrative. After all, Damon's character is not a field operative lurking in shadows most of the time. He's a desk jockey supervising the people who lurk in the shadows.
His lack of emotions does play out as part of the story line, and his long suffering wife, well played by the beautiful Angelina Jolie, finds marriage to this guy a less than fulfilling experience. Actually, this is an angle that is much too underplayed, and we'd like to know more about their relationship, including the key question -- did he love her at all.
The film features a number of well done supporting roles, but hats off to John Turturro, who plays Damon's assistant and resident thug with real style and conviction.
But this movie is about more than just acting. This is a film that tells a fictionalize real life story and raises a number of disturbing questions. The questions are almost too numerous to list in any reasonable amount of space. But they include, who authorizes the CIA to plan the Bay of Pigs fiasco and similar clandestine incursions into the domestic politics of other nations? The President? By what constitutional authority? The film shows CIA wrecking the coffee crop in some other unnamed Latin American country so it can topple another government it doesn't like. Again, where does the US Constitution give anyone this right? In real life, we know the CIA helped Augusto Pinochet overthrow the democratically elected government of Chile in 1973. When did the American people authorize this? Did Richard Nixon tell us he was going to do this when he ran for re-election in 1972? The frightening thing this film does shed some light on is that a small group of men, members of the Skull and Bones fraternity at Yale, conspire in secret, making these kind of decisions, because they think they know what's best for us. But, as the coffee republic segment points out, it is also what's best for these men, who often find a way to cash in personally on the skullduggery they have authorized.
We see this today, of course, through the workings of a little company called Haliburton.
In fact, the people we see mucking things up today, the Bushes, Cheneys, etc. are all members of the same Skull and Bones secret societies that produced John Foster Dulles, his brother Allen, and the rest of the self proclaimed patriots who founded the CIA.
The real irony, of course, is that they are proved to be wrong so often. The Bay of Pigs failed, and Castro remains in power to this day, but guess what, nothing bad has happened to America because of him. Vietnam "fell" and America is now busy engaging it as a trading partner. Again, nothing bad happened to America because Vietnam went communist.
Not only are the CIA types wrong -- blinded by their own political ideology -- but despite spending billions of dollars on their spook projects, they often miss the big things. They failed to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union, failed to predict Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and, if Bush is to be believed, said Saddam was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction when he wasn't.
Don't know about most movie fans, but "Good Shepherd" does not make me sleep better at night knowing we are in such good hands.