Surprisingly good movie about the origins of the CIA

Rating: 8/10 (7 April 2007)

A solid movie about the early history of the CIA. Robert De Niro is not among the most fluid of filmmakers, but his movie is consistently informative and interesting. The movie is surprisingly balanced, neither blindly apologetic of the CIA nor wildly condemnatory. De Niro even plays a small role, as a General based on Bill Donovan, the founder of the OSS (the characters in these movie are all thinly veiled portraits of real people but with different names). The protagonist in the movie is Edward Wilson, played by Matt Damon and clearly inspired by James Jesus Angleton (the counterintelligence chief at the CIA for many years). Though the fact that Angleton was half Mexican is omitted here, most of his professional life appears here: his early life as a student of poetry in Yale, his role in World War II as an intelligence officer, his relationship with Kim Philby (who goes here by the name of Arch Cummings, and is played, against type, by Billy Crudrup), his role in the Golitsyn-Nosenko affair. He also appears as having a role in two operations he wasn't directly involved: the 1953 coup against Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz and the 1961 failed invasion of Bay of Pigs. One of the few flaws of the movie is its try at amateur psychology by having Wilson's motivations be based on the suicide of his father (something which did not happen in Angleton's case). But this is, overall, a fine movie, especially if you are interested in its subject matter.