Film Review: "The Good Shepherd"

Company Man: Hush, Hush, Sweet Operative
By MANOHLA DARGIS
The New York Times
Published: December 22, 2006

“The Good Shepherd,” a chilly film about a spy trapped in the cold of his own heart, seeks to put a tragic human face on the Central Intelligence Agency, namely that of Matt Damon. The story more or less begins and ends at the Bay of Pigs. In between there is a spicy, lively interlude in the 1930’s at Yale University, where little boys are made of skull and bones and secret societies. Yale leads to World War II, cloak and dagger and a British spy cut from the same bespoke cloth as Kim Philby. Then it’s over to Washington, where the citadels of power loom against the cheerless sky like tombstones.

Mr. Damon, who plays a super-spy warrior in the “Bourne” films, excels at secretive men, and few are as mysterious as Edward Wilson, the spy catcher in “The Good Shepherd.” (The title refers to the Bible passage in which Jesus says: “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.”) Though a composite, Wilson seems largely based on the fascinating, freakishly paranoid James Jesus Angleton, a Yale graduate and poetry lover who served in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II and ran C.I.A. counterintelligence from 1954 to 1974. Mr. Angleton cultivated orchids; Wilson builds the more prosaically symbolic miniature ships in bottles.

Mr. Angleton is now widely thought to have hurt the C.I.A. more than he helped it, and articles on the agency’s Web site (cia.gov) frame his tenure in generally unfavorable terms (it had “devastating results,” for one). Written by Eric Roth and directed by Robert De Niro, “The Good Shepherd” doesn’t address the full consequences of that devastation, partly because it wants to take on the institution as well as the man, and partly, one imagines, because Mr. Angleton’s crippling paranoia would have been too difficult to shape into a neat narrative. “The Good Shepherd” is an origin story about the C.I.A., and for the filmmakers that story boils down to fathers who fail their sons, a suspect metaphor that here becomes all too ploddingly literal.

Certainly fathers and sons offer a serviceable alternative to martinis and Aston Martins.
Created in 1947, the C.I.A. has been responsible for many deeds, including our abiding fascination with spooks. No matter which way public sentiment shifts about the agency and its handiwork (Chile, Nicaragua), we remain fascinated with spies, or at least an idea of them, an idea in which matchbox cameras and microphones invariably figure more prominently than miles of locked filing cabinets. Secrets make agencies like the C.I.A. sexy, no matter how rumpled the raincoats. The most interesting thing about “The Good Shepherd” is how hard the filmmakers work not only to demystify the agency, but also to strip it of its allure, its heat.

In “Betrayal,” a book about Aldrich Ames, the double agent who for years ferried C.I.A. secrets to the Soviets, the agency is characterized as “a cross between Yale’s secret Skull and Bones society and the post office.” In its basic outline Mr. Roth’s overly busy screenplay takes the same approach to the agency as it follows Wilson’s journey through institutions of power. At Yale he joins the Skull and Bones, where the power elite helps reproduce itself by bonding and dressing like the orgiastic partygoers in “Eyes Wide Shut.” The all-male members of this clandestine group don’t have sex with one another, at least on screen, but they do mud-wrestle naked, a ritual that underscores the homosocial nature of Wilson’s world.

Yale and World War II are the juiciest bits of the story, partly because they involve the charismatic Dr. Fredericks, played by a superb Michael Gambon. A Yale professor with a leer as insinuating as his walking stick, Dr. Fredericks tries to seduce Wilson into some antidemocratic chicanery through their shared love of poetry. (At Yale, Mr. Angleton helped found a poetry magazine in which he published Ezra Pound, a family acquaintance.) This attempted seduction parallels a rather more comical one involving Angelina Jolie, who plays Margaret Russell, the sister of another Yale student. With her poppy-red lipstick and raucously aggressive sexuality, Margaret proves a far more successful seducer than Dr. Fredericks, as female pulchritude and power triumph over manly poetry and secrets.

Ah, but not for long. This is a man’s world, after all, filled with specters skulking through alleys with blood on their hands and the world on their shoulders. Conscripted into the O.S.S., Wilson travels to London, where he apprentices in espionage and intelligence and meets Arch Cummings (Billy Crudup), a fop with a posh accent patterned on Kim Philby. The film shies away from the more provocative aspects of Mr. Angleton’s long acquaintance with Mr. Philby, and the years they lunched together while Mr. Philby worked for the Soviets. Whatever its true nature, the friendship hurt Mr. Angleton’s marriage, as he later admitted: “Once I met Philby, the world of intelligence that had once interested me consumed me. The home life that had seemed so important faded in importance.”

That spells trouble for Ms. Jolie, alas, who after her spectacular entrance has to spend most of the film as the aggrieved, abandoned wife. It is not a good fit. A force of nature, Ms. Jolie reads more believably when she’s running through the jungle in boots and a bikini, as she does in the “Tomb Raider” flicks, than when standing on the sidelines in a domestic nightmare. But stand and screech and gamely slosh the booze she does while Mr. Damon’s spy helps win the war and later helps turn the C.I.A. into a shadow empire with some dependable character actors: Mr. De Niro as one of the agency’s founders, the dependably great Alec Baldwin as an F.B.I. agent and an equally fine William Hurt as the pipe-smoking head of the C.I.A.

Mr. De Niro does fine in his avuncular role and, in the main, even better as the film’s director. He imbues “The Good Shepherd” with a funereal vibe that works especially well on the dark, dank streets of London, where Wilson learns his first repellent lesson in spy-catching, and during his early years in Washington. Among the film’s most striking visual tropes is the image of Wilson simply going to work in the capital alongside other similarly dressed men, a spectral army clutching briefcases and silently marching to uncertain victory. In silhouette the men recall the gangsters in a Jean-Pierre Melville film, even as their anonymity evokes the drones in Madeleine L’Engle’s book “A Wrinkle in Time” who are ruled by an evil disembodied brain called IT.

Who rules the drones in “The Good Shepherd”? Who is IT? The president, the people, American mining and banana companies, the ghosts of fathers past, the agency itself? It’s hard to know, though now the C.I.A. answers to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. These are hard questions, but they are also too big, too complex and perhaps too painful for even this ambitious (2 hours, 37 minutes) project, which can only elude and insinuate, not enlighten and inform. Although the film seems true in broad outline and scrupulous detail, and the postwar Berlin rubble looks as real as the documentary footage of Fidel Castro slipped between the lightly fictionalized intrigue, there is something ungraspable and unknowable about this world, even if it is also one we ourselves have helped create.

“The Good Shepherd” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). There is some violence, including a scene of torture, as well as adult language and tactful sex.

THE GOOD SHEPHERD

Opens Friday nationwide.

Directed by Robert De Niro; written by Eric Roth; director of photography, Robert Richardson; edited by Tariq Anwar; music by Marcelo Zarvos and Bruce Fowler; production designer, Jeannine Oppewall; produced by James G. Robinson, Jane Rosenthal and Mr. De Niro; released by Universal Pictures. Running time: 157 minutes.

WITH: Matt Damon (Edward Wilson), Angelina Jolie (Clover/Margaret Russell), Alec Baldwin (Sam Murach), Tammy Blanchard (Laura), Billy Crudup (Arch Cummings), Robert De Niro (Bill Sullivan), Keir Dullea (Senator John Russell Sr.), Michael Gambon (Dr. Fredericks), Martina Gedeck (Hanna Schiller), William Hurt (Philip Allen), Timothy Hutton (Thomas Wilson), Mark Ivanir (Valentin Mironov No. 2), Gabriel Macht (John Russell Jr.), Lee Pace (Richard Hayes), Joe Pesci (Joseph Palmi), Eddie Redmayne (Edward Wilson Jr.), John Sessions (Valentin Mironov No. 1/Yuri Modin), Oleg Stefan (Ulysses/Stas Siyanko), John Turturro (Ray Brocco), Laila Robins (Toddy Allen), Christopher Evan Welch (Photography Technical Officer), Neal Huff (Teletype Operations Officer), Jason Butler Harner (Teletype Communications Officer), Amy Wright (Safe House Operations Officer) and Ann Hampton Callaway (1961 Deer Island Singer).