The Good Shepherd

In his second directorial effort, Robert De Niro does not live up to the quality of A Bronx Tale, his first, nor his status as a god in the acting category. The Good Shepherd is a good movie when it sticks to telling us the spy side of the story but has two key problems that block it from being really good or excellent.

The problems: despite constantly shifting between the movie’s main time period, the weeks just before and after the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, and an episodic look at how protagonist Edward Wilson (Matt Damon) grew from a Yale scholastic stud and poet into one of the CIA’s top leaders, there’s just too much wasted screen time in the nearly three hours this runs, and, second, Damon plays Wilson as if he were made of rock, which is terrific for a spy but terrible for what is a drama and not a Bourne-style thriller.

De Niro and scripter Eric Roth (Munich, Ali, The Insider, The Postman) are attempting to give us a retro-modern lesson on the founding of the Central Intelligence Agency (referred to as CIA, never “the CIA,” since as one character says late in the movie, you never say “the God”) via the Wilson viewpoint character. They feel we need to learn about Wilson as a person to give the Agency’s actions context and humanity so we see Edward as:

• a college student at Yale, his induction into Skull and Bones, his only real love affair–with Laura, a lovely deaf Yale coed played by Tammy Blanchard–and his shotgun albeit career enhancing marriage to Clover Russell (Angeline Jolie), sister of a Bones mate and daughter of a US Senator, all in the two years before WWII;
• his return home after spending the entire war in Europe to a wife with whom he has no emotional connection and a six year old son he’s never met and who he also never bonds with
• a one night sexual reunion with that deaf woman, 18 years after their last date, after a chance meeting.

These scenes take up at least 45 minutes and probably closer to an hour, which could have been condensed to about 15 minutes without losing any of their plot setup or audience identifying effects.

Damon is generally quite capable of delivering a much better performance than we see here (Syriana, Good Will Hunting, The Departed, the Bourne trilogy) and I can only attribute the difference to De Niro’s instructions. Perhaps he wanted us to believe or understand that the spy’s need to display the ultimate poker face cannot be turned off and on at will; those willing to back up their extreme patriotism with ruthless dedication, that is, have little compunction in sacrificing family either, but instead of extraneous verbiage and scenes this could have been delivered in a few scraps of dialog. However, even in the scenes with Laura or his college poetry class, which I expect are intended to gift us a glance at who Edward might have been, I felt Damon was never allowed to soften his granite body language.

If The Good Shepherd had only focused on the rivalry between Mother (the KGB’s nickname for Wilson) and Ulysses (CIA’s codename for his KGB counterpart, played by Oleg Shtefanko) I think this could have been the success that De Niro, Roth and Damon expected cinematically and as a historical analysis. This rivalry takes center stage in the movie’s final third, rewarding the patient viewer with the emotional energy absent from most of the first 100+ minutes with dramatic spy games that continually raise the stakes and provide a meaningful payoff to the interspersed scenes in which Wilson and his constant companion Ray Broca (John Turturro, who wisely offers his emotions throughout) are analyzing the reasons for the failure to overthrow Castro at the Bay of Pigs.

moderately recommended