Not quite your agent Bourne

Rating: Null/10 (30 December 2006)

(watched in Toronto)
It's interesting to note the genre assigned to TGS by IMDb  "drama/romance/thriller". It's not one of those, at least not in a real sense. The closest genre is probably a biopic, although it is generally not offered as one, and there are purportedly two real life characters merged into Edward Wilson (Matt Damon) the loyal CIA agent. Some would see TGS as a CIA procedural, but it can also be viewed as the character study of one man. Nor should agent Wilson be considered agent Bourne with a different name. There is no action to speak of in this "spy thriller" in which a 20-year span (mainly the in the 1940s and 1950s) of agent Wilson is depicted in microscopic detail by Robert De Niro in his third effort from the director's chair.
Just to illustrate the attention paid to details, that 20 most crucial year of Wilson's life starts with the scene of his performance as Buttercup (in Damon's own falsetto) at Yale, and ends with his opening a personal safe in which we see on the very top the scores for HMS Pinafore. The most important content of the safe, however, is his father's suicide note which he has refrained from opening since his early childhood.
In the movie, the "present" is the Bay of Pigs crisis, during which time Wilson has already become a trusted member of the CIA. Alternating with the present, recounting the aforementioned 20-year span, are flashbacks starting with Wilson's graduation from Yale and his first taste of a "secret society" in Skull and Bones. We then see his recruitment into secret service by none other then General Billy Sullivan (played by De Niro himself) and secondment to the OSS operations in Europe (by the way, while 007 is the spy icon the world knows, there is also a much less known "OSS 117" (1963)). But there was sufficient time for 2 romantic interludes before he goes away for six years. The first, a sweet love affair with a deaf girl, was nipped in the bud by the second, a moment of erotic fling with a friend's sex-starved sister (Angelina Jolie) leading to an unwanted pregnancy that in turn leads to a marriage-out-of-sense-of-duty. Coming back after six years, when he sees his son for the very first time, Wilson has a lot of amends to make. This he does apparently quite successfully with the son, but not the wife (whom he never loved), particularly when his true love turns up again.
Most agonizing however is Wilson's relationship not with the two women, but with the two men, his father and his son. His fathers' suicide lurks hauntingly in the background throughout while events involving his son take him through anguished nightmares. But his personal emotional vicissitude is only half of the drama we see about this man. There is also an entire front of his controversial life as a rising CIA agent. All this gives Demon much meat to chew on and he turns in a performance more layered and watchable than that of the simply puzzled agent Bourne who has lost his memory.
In addition to Demon and De Niro, there is a stellar cast on the macho side of this movie that is, if you haven't checked it out in advance, going to make you utter small gasps  William Hurt, Alec Baldwin, Michael Gambon, Billy Crudup, Joe Pesci being the best known among them.
There are a couple of small things that are quite noticeable in De Niro's direction. Voice over is used so liberally that you'll find it starting just about every new scene. I was chuckling silently as I watched, wondering that if these little overlapping were not there, how much longer would this 160 minute movie become? The other thing I noticed is just one scene with such an aura of other-worldliness that it doesn't seem to belong to this movie  when Wilson's wife (Jolie) leaves him, taking a boat from the pier in the mist. They could have almost played "Into the west" as background music.