A Spy Story, Tense and Subdued.

Rating: 7/10 (17 July 2007)

I don't know. I called it a spy story because that's what leaps to mind, an available schema. But as much as it's about Matt Damon's dull CIA bureaucrat, it's about fathers and sons or, more generally, about allegiances. Do I owe more to my "family" or to my "country"? Of course John Wayne grappled with this question in a dozen movies, but they never boiled down to the question of whether or not to sacrifice your son, one of the few people you've loved, for the sake of an ironbound sub-unit of the big bureaucracy that represents the government. That's a hard choice for a guy to make, whether he's Abraham or Matt Damon's spook.
It's rather a long, slow slog through this film, a somewhat disjointed journey from Damon's years as a member of Bones at Yale, through the intrigues of World War II, to the final failure of The Bay of Pigs in Cuba. CIA was wrong on Bay of Pigs. (A character tells us why there is never a "the" used before "CIA". For the same reason there is no "the" before "God".) However, whatever the advice of the CIA, and since I am a non-insider I can use "the".
We seem all too eager to believe our own myths about the suffering, imprisoned people living under a dictator who are eager for us to foment rebellion so they can rise up, throw off the mean yoke of subjugation, and greet us as liberators.
It IS a long story of one man's career and his off-stage life, what there is of it. But Robert DeNiro, the director of the film, handles it with efficiency and delicacy. He's helped immeasurably by splendid photography and extremely good performances from his cast. One might imagine that DeNiro, of Mediterranean descent, might find it hard to get into the skins of these upper-class, mirthless, zombified WASPS with their high IQs and schoolboy loyalties, but actually DeNiro does quite well.
He doesn't take the easy way, the cheap way, of explaining these lives to us. Angelina Jolie as Damon's wife drifts away from him because he's absent from home for years at a time and seems, well, joyless. But there is no such speech. Instead DeNiro treats the audience as adults and let's us figure it out pretty much for ourselves. It's true that the only REAL existences seem to come from ethnic types -- DeNiro himself as the director of the CIA, modeled after Wild Bill Donovan, and Joe Pesci in a tiny part as a possible hit man, who asks very sensibly, "The Italians have their families and the church, the Irish have their homeland, even the N*****s have their music. But what have YOU guys got?" ("I have the United States of America," replies Damon.) DeNiro doesn't make the mistake of assuming these WASPS have no feelings. They just express them differently, not through loud parties or hugs and kisses or facial expressions of operatic magnitude. They express them in stares, or glances, and in measured, calculated speech. It's human alright but they're using a different code than the rest of us are used to. It's another intelligent decision on the director's part.
The price the movie pays for such adult techniques is that nothing much seems to be happening on the screen at any given moment. I wound up getting lost from time to time. And, really, Matt Damon's character is so specialized, so small in everything he pays sincere attention to, that he reminded me of Vladimir Nabokov's obsession with the genitalia of the butterfly, only without the continental charm.
An interesting film, despite its lack of action. The little action there is, is quickly over with, or, as in the case of Michael Gambon's murder by the OSS, it takes place at some distance, off screen, and is only suggested by the most horrific of terrified screams from the distant victim. If you want a similar story -- young man gets into an agency at the beginning and grows up with it -- that is colorful, full of drama and action, leaves nothing to the imagination, commercially oriented and completely without challenge -- a comic-strip movie -- try "The FBI Story" with James Stewart.
It's also kind of interesting to get some idea of what goes on inside Skull and Bones. (Our current president is a member.) I was at Yale for a while but nobody tapped me. Now I'm glad.