Real Tight Drama

Rating: 8/10 (21 February 2007)

This is really a tight drama which reminds one very much of the mood & tone of the Godfather series. When I went to see this film, all I had heard was it was a story of the birth of the CIA. After seeing it, I understand that all too well. The story is done, starting from the Bay of Pigs CIA failure, & then going back to the beginning of the CIA.
It is obvious that when the CIA was born, in wartime, that it had to be a secretive organization. This story runs true to that as it is about as cloak & dagger as it gets. The main character get drafted into the start of the CIA much the way many people got drafted into the war itself- his friends in the college fraternity decide he belongs & they make him an offer he can't refuse.
At the same time, he has an indiscreet affair with his friends sister (Jolie), she becomes pregnant, & going with these times, he has to do the right thing & marry her. After the wedding, he starts his cloak & dagger work in London & does not see his wife or son until after the war. During this time, the story hints that she might have been seeing another man, but then never really shows for sure if there is or not.
Our operative has been distanced from his wife, & stays that way the rest of the film as they are at least split entirely by the end of the film if not totally divorced. His job becomes more & more mysterious as it seems everyone he trusts in the movie eventually becomes someone he can't trust. There is always someone looking "over his shoulder".
His son grows up & follows dads footsteps into the agency. After going through all this background that leads to the Bay of Pigs, it is strongly hinted that someone spilled the beans to Castro's agents & that is why it failed. As he investigates, it turns out that his son, is who that someone appears to be, spilling what he overheard his dad say to his girlfriend who might or might not have been an agent involved with another double agent. In Godfather type fashion, both the girl & the double agent are eliminated by dad to protect his son.
This film is a long tight drama which very much paints the CIA as an intelligence agency of our government which was created during the war to help the war effort, & then became an agency which abused it's powers much the same way a dysfunctional Mafia family would to creates its own problems under the guise of defending America. Our tale does throw in a few real historic themes of what happened including the hints that when JFK took office he intended to destroy the agency.
Sadly, it might be years, if ever, that the real story of Americas legal arm of the Mafia can ever or will ever be told. This film does a great job of showing how the agency truly operates without getting too specific. If you like well done, intense drama, this is your kind of film. It makes the viewer think about a monster created by a war with another monster, Adolf Hitler.
At well over 2 hours, it can almost lose the viewer as it does the story using several flashbacks from the Bay of Pigs to earlier times but I didn't get lost, so it does the job better than most films of this genre.
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