A Thinking Man's Film

Rating: 9/10 (31 December 2006)

A sincere congratulations to the filmmakers who wove this intricate deceit and an even sincerer kudos to the few who were able not only to remain in their seats but also to appreciate the latent hues of what appeared to many a sterilely colored film.
Any discussion of The Good Shepherd's brilliant elements must begin with Matt Damon's rendition of Edward Wilson, a Cold War era CIA agent ostensibly dehumanized by the tediously executed yet crushingly weighty protocol his career demands. Though his calculated veneer seems overly flat through the first portion of this lengthy film (take the almost unrealistically miniscule evidence of aging and his paucity of emotion), the subtleties of his character accumulate as the yawns around a transfixed viewer become more audible.
Speaking in generalities, Wilson's is the story of a brilliant intellect suffocated by its acquiescence to a supposedly greater good. Anecdotally, consider a scene placed so early within the three hours as to have likely rendered it unremarkable in the memories of most viewers. During his initiation into a certain, influential society of "those whose country the rest of us are just visiting," Damon's character objects to the degradation of finding himself at the receiving end of a senior member's urine. His brief unwillingness to surrender dignity in the name of subservience to an ethos (or the entity representing it) plants a seed in the mind of the attentive viewer that furtively blossoms throughout the rest of the film in the form of a repressed individuality that belies his increasingly mechanical visage. This is not the story of a bland civil servant, but rather a tale of the manner in which civil servitude can strip even a New Haven poet of his human vitality.
Yet another moment lost (perhaps) amidst the interwoven timeline that speaks volumes as to the principal character's internal strife comes amidst the rubble of a newly divided Berlin. A still-young Agent Wilson quips that his superior's weakness may not be the chocolate his mother bestowed upon him, but rather the eagerness for approval that such systems of reward engender. This insight proves incisive with regard to Damon's character as he meets each request made of him throughout the remainder of the film with "would it please you?" Despite nary a camera delving into the inner workings of the KGB, one cinematographic cue during a scene that even the film's critics laud speaks to the universality of the plight suffered by the cogs of inhuman (and inhumane) governmental locomotion. As Agent Brocco beats, tortures and strips nude a Soviet operative the CIA suspects to be a mole, one cannot help but notice the striking resemblance between John Turturro and the man he is waylaying as their faces mirror one another at close range for several moments. Even before the audience learns that this tragic figure was indeed telling the truth to his interrogators, it waxes ironic that doppelgangers in both appearance and dedication to national service drive one another to the film's most heinously graphic deeds.
My only regret is that in the Berlin scene between Wilson and his sweet-toothed mentor, an unnecessary reference to the parallel "hearts and minds" campaigns of the post-World War II and modern eras was inserted to render an already abundantly topical film more evidently so. The pervasiveness of federal agency grown too lumberingly methodical to maintain its consonance with the civilization it was intended to safeguard should be at the fore of most American's minds. Catastrophically, the ubiquity of minds unwilling to pierce the veil of bureaucratic docility that guises this film's dehumanizing core leaves little hope that the moviegoer/citizen can decipher the patronizing platitudes of the modern political idiom.
Thank you, Mr. De Niro, for making us think.