Cold Warrior

Rating: 9/10 (13 January 2007)

"The Good Shepherd" is a rich, sprawling film stuffed with fine performances and capable of expanding to take in vast chunks of history or narrowing to concentrate on delicate human moments.
It's a movie in which world-shattering events and piercing domestic crises are given credibly equivalent weight. Directed with smooth craft by Robert De Niro (!) it reveals a great depth of detail and parallels actual events so plausibly that it's relevant today although it deals with events of more than 40 years ago.
Matt Damon stars as Edward Wilson, a taciturn and precise scion of New England whose life has led him from family tragedy to study at Yale to intelligence service in London and Berlin during and after World War II to a position as spymaster at the fledgling Central Intelligence Agency in the first decades of the Cold War. Wilson is a bloodless mixture of patriotism, poetry, shame, guilt and WASP noblesse oblige. He's a scholar and a Skull and Bonesman, a closet romantic and a professional cipher, a world-class compartmentalizer who keeps his private and working lives rigorously separate -- or at least as separate as events allow.
Wilson first appears in April 1961, when he authorizes the CIA's botched attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro by invading Cuba's Bay of Pigs, and the film travels backward into his life as he tries to uncover the source of the intelligence leak that doomed the operation. We meet his father (Timothy Hutton), his favorite professor at Yale (Michael Gambon), his Skull and Bones brother (Lee Pace), the deaf girl he loves (Tammy Blanchard), the fast girl he has to marry (Angelina Jolie), the FBI agent who first engages him in spying (Alec Baldwin), the founder of the wartime intelligence agency who recruits him (De Niro), his tough second-in-command (John Turturro) and his nemesis, a Soviet spymaster (Oleg Stefan). It's a full, colorful company, spanning the globe and the years, and yet all of them have their proper places in Wilson's obsessively tidy mind.
Damon is the buttoned-down, bled-white center of the film, a still, calm, hyper-alert presence whose silences force others to speak rashly but which also keeps at arm's length the people to whom he should be closest. It's a fine turn in a film filled with wonderful acting: Baldwin's seedy G-man; Gambon's shady aesthete; Blanchard's earnest shy girl; Jolie's domesticated, willful wife.
Now and again, Eric Roth's script slips into melodrama (how does a Russian spymaster get in and out of the U.S. so readily?). But it's full of believably pseudo-historic detail. De Niro stages the film with impeccable fidelity and moves it along with remarkable fluency and grace. It's nearly three hours long and dense with twists and secrets, yet it plays like a dance: smooth and handsome and full of life.
It's the type of film that may be forgiven its imperfections when they are compared with the vastness of its accomplishments.