The physical production of The Good Shepherd is of a very high caliber. Robert Richardson is a peerless cinematographer, and the movie often looks just stunning, both in shadowy rooms with dramatic, noirish lighting and in vivid exteriors set on several continents. The costumes (Ann Roth) and production design (by Jeannine Claudia Oppewall, who also did Seabiscuit and Catch Me If You Can) take us convincingly through the various eras and settings. (Let’s also give some credit to whoever aptly decided to fit Matt Damon with perhaps the least flattering pair of eyeglasses in the history of the cinema; this is not the right movie for a sexy, glamorous spy.) But the gloomy and beautiful musical score, by Bruce Fowler and Marcelo Zarvos, is far too plentiful, overemphasizing every emotional moment and leaving very little room for a viewer to breathe, much less respond spontaneously.
Considering that this is only the second film Robert De Niro has directed (and that it has been 13 years since the first), his storytelling ability and skill with actors is impressive. And still it’s almost impossible not to imagine what Martin Scorsese or Alfred Hitchcock (or Paul Greengrass, who directed the second Bourne movie, brilliantly, as well as this year’s finest film, United 93) might have done with the same material. With the touch of a film artist, the audience might feel real terror, might gasp with laughter at some perverse, daring bits of business, and might be whisked more confidently past the soap and contrivance; without it we have to settle for an interesting, flawed story well told – not the worst of compromises.
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.