Serious and thoughtful, smoothly textured and deliberately paced, The Good Shepherd is a very different type of spy movie from Matt Damon’s Bourne pictures, which are all briskness and nervous kinetic energy, with barely a meaningful thought in their heads. This new film, written by Eric Roth (Munich, Forrest Gump) and directed by Robert De Niro, is about the origins and history of the CIA, covering the years 1939-1961 in the life of one important agent, from college right through to his involvement in the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba. In fact, it could occasionally use more kinetic energy of some sort (though the Bourne type of pinball pacing wouldn’t work here), but it’s a respectable piece of work, never less than interesting – yet rarely generating the intensity or sparks one hopes for based on the fine opening scenes.
Well, not the very first scenes, which establish what will turn out to be a too-contrived spy mystery concerning the Bay of Pigs operation. That material, puzzling and murky enough to be annoying at first, alternates with flashbacks to Yale in 1939, where Edward Wilson (Damon), a poetry student, gets tapped for membership first by the Skull and Bones secret society, and then by government spies. We learn that his naval officer father was a suicide amid rumors of treason. Edward is recruited to spy on one of his professors, and then eventually to go to London as part of a new military intelligence organization, the OSS.
This part of the story fascinates, draws you right in to both the mechanics of spying and the way Edward’s personality is being formed and changed. It may actually be unfair to complain that the intrigue generated in the first hour sets you up for a later letdown. It’s probably inevitable that the payoff won’t match our expectations. But at least at first, The Good Shepherd is bracingly reminiscent of Graham Greene, if far less subtle. As we realize that many of the things required of Edward will be horrendous, morally indefensible – and as he realizes it too – the movie casts a real, if too brief, spell.
Part of the problem is the amount of time spent on Edward’s personal life: his blossoming romance with a young deaf woman (Tammy Blanchard) and his ambivalent and potentially disastrous flirtation with a classmate’s sister – and senator’s daughter (Angelina Jolie). At first the light romance contrasts pleasingly with the darkening spy plot.
Article comments
1 - Fred Landis
Since the collapse of Communism,the greatest producers of disinformation are movie critics.The only way they get their ideas reprinted by the studios is if they sell the movie.
Proof of this argument is reviews of THe Good Shepherd.The senior British intelligence officer who spots Angleton is killed by his own kind for being gay.The Bay of Pigs invasion failed because of a KGB mata hari.OSS and CIA recruitment excluded CAtholics.In point of fact Philby surrounded himself with gays,who were everywhere in MI6,the Cuban invasion failed because it had no support,and the Covert Action section was predominatly Catholic.Angleton himself was a tall Catholic independent paranoid mad genius,and is depicted as a short Anglo autistic bureocrat. THe people who made this movie may know something about Godfathers but nada of CIA.
2 - Fred Landis
Since the collapse of Communism,the greatest producers of disinformation are movie critics.The only way they get their ideas reprinted by the studios is if they sell the movie.
Proof of this argument is reviews of THe Good Shepherd.The senior British intelligence officer who spots Angleton is killed by his own kind for being gay.The Bay of Pigs invasion failed because of a KGB mata hari.OSS and CIA recruitment excluded CAtholics.In point of fact Philby surrounded himself with gays,who were everywhere in MI6,the Cuban invasion failed because it had no support,and the Covert Action section was predominatly Catholic.Angleton himself was a tall Catholic independent paranoid mad genius,and is depicted as a short Anglo autistic bureocrat. THe people who made this movie may know something about Godfathers but nada of CIA.
3 - handyguy
I don't know what prompted this unpleasant and inaccurate comment 6 months later, but I'll respond: The Good Shepherd is fiction, with some characters based on some aspects of real people. Your criticisms would be more applicable if the film were presented as a biography of Angleton.
Your opening salvo against "movie critics" is ludicrously off the mark. Movie critics do much more than recite plots and compare them to facts. Some of us, at least, try to respond to the movie aesthetically. And my guess is that the movie's producers would have liked other, favorable reviews much more than my own mixed one, for which in any case I was not paid by anyone. Nor am I interested in selling anything with my reviews.
Please go bother someone else.