The world of espionage classically makes for exciting movies. It’s a realm of danger and intrigue, where even a thing as simple as ordering a custom tailored suit can become a seething bed of paranoia and uncertainty. Historical films, on the other hand, tend toward the stately, lethargic, and even dull. Obedience to the facts rarely makes for engrossing storytelling.
What, then, to make of a film that crosses those lines without regard to the accuracies of fact, or the rules of espionage engagement? That question is at the heart of The Good Shepherd, Robert DeNiro’s stately film about the birth of the CIA. It follows the life of Edward Wilson (Matt Damon), ostensibly a fictional character based on the CIA’s legendary chief of counter-intelligence, James Jesus Angleton and Richard Bissell, who engineered the failed Bay Of Pigs operation.
The film spans Wilson’s life from his days at Yale to the war in Europe, through the heart of the cold war to the founding of the CIA. Shunning the well-known historical peaks, The Good Shepherd is content with the shadows. The Bay Of Pigs fiasco is quickly shrugged off, while the interrogation of a defecting Russian general is rendered with a singular intensity. Alive with small details and shadows; focusing on emotionless men hiding secrets with lies, the blurred line between fiction and reality becomes jarring. With each betrayal, the narrative power is undercut by the unrelenting question of what’s real and what’s manufactured.
The blurred lines between truth and reality are virtually meaningless in the bold Hollywood strokes of Braveheart and J.F.K. Here, those blurred lines are so close to the heart of the film that they threaten to overwhelm the whole endeavor. When Wilson romances a pretty, but deaf student at Yale, it feels like a distraction. It’s too cinematic to be true, but so crucial that it would be disappointing to have been invented outright. When offered a choice between a honeymoon with his newly-pregnant wife (played with cool reserve by Angelina Jolie) and a six year stint in a war-torn Europe, the choice is a no-brainer.
The anti-James Bond, Wilson is not a dashing, flamboyant practitioner of espionage. Instead, he is a measured, steely eyed bureaucrat, so quiet that even his suits have the uncanny ability to match the wallpaper of any given room, providing a white collar camouflage to further help him disappear in plain sight. There’s something dissonant about Wilson, something too contrived. The facts of the CIA’s creation are little known and fascinating, but the character of Wilson is a blurry lens to examine them. As the story unfolds, questions about what is real and what is contrived hover in almost every scene, to the point of distraction. It’s a disorienting spin through a period of history where the art of disinformation was perfected. Everything in the movie has the tactile slipperiness of a spy movie; whole scenes are lost in elusive dialogue and neutral-toned walls, and at the same time it’s engrossing – almost overwhelming – and at the same time oddly distant and opaque.
Matt Damon delivers a terrific and intense performance, but it remains unconvincing. All too often it calls to mind high school theater, watching a Willy Loman who can’t yet buy a six-pack unconvincingly rage against the indignities of a failed life. His face, even when blank, remains too young. Plus, it’s completely out of the realm of possibility that he and Angelina Jolie could spawn such an awkward, asymmetrical son.
Out of loyalty to country, Wilson will sacrifice or betray everyone close to him, choosing the cold halls of paranoia over the warm corruptibility of emotional bonds. Through all the opacity, though, The Good Shepherd makes the emotional calculus of principles over emotion painfully clear. We never learn what makes Wilson tick, but we carefully watch every virtue he is dedicated to protecting get stripped from him. Like Al Pacino’s ascension in The Godfather, the descent is precisely detailed, and excruciating to watch.
The title is abbreviated from the biblical phrase “the good shepherd lays down his life for his flock.†A better biblical reference might be to ask what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, but lose his soul? Apparently a corner office in Washington.
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