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The Good Shepherd

I need to see it again.

No, not like The Departed, Matt Damon's other big awards-season movie, in which I left the theater dazzled and thoroughly entertained and itching to turn back to catch the next showing. The Good Shepherd is much more subdued, much more intent on providing to us not entertainment, but rather a history lesson, a thesis, and a series of topics for discussion. I felt, while I was watching it, that I needed to read the Cliff's Notes afterwards.

And yet let me repeat: I need to see it again. The movie is extremely well-made, well-acted and directed (by Robert De Niro), and always involving. The flashy stars get you in the seats, the dark notions of intrigue draw you in, and before you know it you've warmed to the movie, even if, in all its stone-faced seriousness, the movies never warms to you back.

Damon stars as Edward Wilson, a composite of a few real-life men who helped found the Central Intelligence Agency. The film goes from Wilson's days at Yale in the 1930s to around the time of the Bay of Pigs in 1961. The notoriously secretive Skull and Bones fraternity, a club that American presidents have been known to be a part of (and yeah, was also the inspiration for that Joshua Jackson movie The Skulls), makes a direct appearance as Wilson first enters the secret world of rich male WASPs. Then he meets a shadowy government figure (hey look, Alec Baldwin's in yet another movie) and enters the world of very xenophobic, very nationalistic, and very paranoid rich male WASPs. Of that demographic, Wilson is their king. The movie's main question, if there is a main question, is whether or not a small group of homogenous men can really make the best decisions for the melting pot of America.

The film is sidetracked for a bit in which we're introduced to two women, one of whom we care about. That would be Laura (Tammy Blanchard), a sweet deaf girl who Wilson falls in love with. Unfortunately, he also manages to get another girl pregnant, and being a sensible adult who's friends with the girl's brother, is forced to marry her. As luck would have it, she happens to be Angelina Jolie.

Frankly, it's a strange part for her. She bursts onto the screen as a breath of fresh air, but later, like the movie, becomes stifled, cold, and depressed. She's playing, in other words, the requisite suffering-wife role, and it doesn't fit her. She's meant to be the action star and she's restrained behind awkward dressed and

bright red lipstick and a script in which she must be upset 100% of the time. Maybe restraining her charisma was the intention, an effort to show the role that Wilson's wife was forced into. All I could ever think of was, "Gee, this is a really weird part for Angelina Jolie."

A lot of famous faces pop up, though, and unlike Jolie most of them are pitch-perfect. William Hurt and John Turturro could both sell us their likable roles in their sleep, but actually seem to be putting their heart into it, and Michael Gambon is particularly compelling in early scenes as Wilson's kindly, Nazi-sympathizing poetry teacher. De Niro himself appears occasionally as a senior founder of the CIA, and we're given the treat of a Joe Pesci cameo late in the film.

That scene, a mere two-minute conversation between Pesci and Damon, has a spark and a wit to the film that's sorely missing in the extremely somber scenes that make up 90% of the movie. Matt Damon's performance might be brilliant but it also might be lacking; I've given myself a while and I still can't decide. Essentially, he spends the entire two-and-a-half hour running time completely stone-faced. He cracks a smile on a few choice occasions, sure, but his character is a desperately inward man. Ultimately I think it works. There's a sense of pathos in Damon's stare that's hard to deny; on the other hand, watching him in every scene of this epic becomes less than riveting after the first two hours or so.

You've noticed, no doubt, that I stopped recounting the plot at Wilson's marriage with Jolie's character, Margaret. That's because the plot quickly dives into labyrinthine paths of betrayal, deception, intrigue, and all of the "trust no one" mantras familiar in spy films. The screenplay, by Eric Roth, works overtime with the details, as we're given plot after plot: the introduction of the possibly nefarious Arch Cummings (Billy Crudup with a British accent); the end of World War II; an enveloping sense of Cold War paranoia involving two separate Russian informants; Wilson's own young-adult son and his possibly treacherous dealings with a mysterious woman; and the aforementioned Bay of Pigs and the restructuring of the CIA.

It's a lot to swallow, and the film is so well made that despite the constant somber attitude I want to swallow it all. De Niro knows a thing or two about making movies, and holds the whole operation together from start to finish with class. Ultimately, what the film mostly reminded me of was the type of long essay I'd be assigned to read at college. Difficult to get through, at times tiresomely meticulous, but I'll be darned if I didn't finish it with a happy satisfaction and an appreciation

for learning.

Movie Grade: B

Synopsis:

The tumultuous early history of one of the most covert and powerful government agencies in the world is viewed through the prism of one man’s life in the espionage thriller The Good Shepherd, starring Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie, directed by Robert De Niro.