Long and Frustrating

Rating: 5/10 (19 January 2007)

This film has Robert De Niro as director, and I'm sure his name on the project got him his choice of actors and actresses. The movie he made is beautifully textured. Even if you own a HD DVD player and a wide-screen television, you might miss the lavish attention to detail in such things as men's shirts, manilla folders, vintage radios, and the way paper catches on fire--and there is more. Near the first ten minutes of the movie or so, there is, however, an out-of-place "zoom and pan" camera shot on Matt Damon; it's the kind of shot you expect on an action hero in a comic book to establish his righteousness, not the kind of shot you'd expect to use on a character who's little "day at the beach" got ruined. It would be out-of-place if it weren't for the fact that DeNiro uses the same shot near the end of the movie to convey the same sense of personal or professional disaster. The movie is put together like a Rorshach (chek speling) test in which DeNiro made half a movie and folded it in half, then that half gets roughly translated (in different nuances) onto the other half of the film. (Example: Young "Yalies" sing in the first half; old "Yalies" sing in the second half). This movie is about one man's, Matt Damon's character, experiences with the O.S.S., the C.I.A. and the toll being a waspish American hero-with some flaws. There are bigger events, but Damon is there, as unemotional as he can possibly be, for all of them. Unfortunately, this movie (2 hours and 47 minutes long) is too long to be about such an uninteresting character. DeNiro never does let us know what drives Damon's character. His initiation into Skull and Bones (in fact all of the Skull and Bones story) could've been left on the cutting room floor. Many of the scenes succeed on there own, but, when put together, they don't tell a great story (and part of the problem may be because there is way too much flashback and flashback from flashback). Also, I really didn't know what William Hurt did, and I didn't know that one of the friends turned traitor and skipped to Moscow, like real life Philby. Also, the way it ends would probably keep it off of a lot of people's "must own" lists. In summary, good performances, great scenes, but overall too long to be compelling.