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The Good Shepherd
Assassinations. “Misinformation” campaigns. Secret prisons. Quashing of Democratic movements. And much bad, bad, bad, wrong, wrong, wrong information.
So much is now known about the CIA — almost none of it good — for many of us it’s hard to imagine there was a time when good people thought becoming a spook was a good thing to do. Born of the OSS, the Allied intelligence agency in WWW (when spies really were a serious business) and fed on the paranoia of the subsequent Cold War, the CIA morphed from an intelligence-gathering agency to a ruthless killing machine.
As did Edward Wilson (Matt Damon), the fictional hero of The Good Shepherd, who was in at the beginning and stayed through the agency’s, and his own, corruption. Wilson made little errors like the Bay of Pigs invasion (the CIA thought Cubans would rise up; they did, and shot down American invaders) and when he crosses the end-justifies-the-means line and tacitly approves torture, it turns out to be the wrong guy.
The Good Shepherd is a statement about the corrosive effects of fear and power. What it isn’t, unfortunately, is a good, or even at times watchable, movie. With “A Bronx Tale,” Robert De Niro proved he could direct, and for this flick he assembled a stellar cast: Damon, Angelina Jolie, William Hurt, Alec Baldwin, Billy Crudup, Keir Dullea, Timothy Hutton, Joe Pesci and De Niro himself as (symbolism here) the guy behind the whole operation. Who would expect a flop? But flop this film does.
Maybe it isn’t all his fault. Part of the problem may be he is portraying the utter lifelessness and lack of humanity in the agency. Which might make a good written paper, but also makes a film that even at half its more than 2 1/2 hours would seem too long.
Damon is a rich kid (elite Yale WASP member of the secret Skull and Bones society, not unlike two recent presidents) who decides to serve his country, but stoically.
Jolie is wasted as his wife, a one-night stand whose only function in the story, and the movie, is to give Damon the son who, years and years down the line, provides Wilson with apparently the first and only moral dilemma of his life.
The Good Shepherd is full of clichés that, if meant to be ironic, fall flat. There is homage to the 60s, with actual news footage from the Bay of Pigs era but also a tousle-haired Wilson and his beautiful dark-haired girlfriend on the dunes of a New England beach that serves no purpose other than to look like 60s publicity stills of JFK and Jackie.
We have lots of shadowy streets where men in fedoras lurk in doorways. Ponderous music that at times almost seems put in as a joke. Lines like, “Get out while you still believe. Get out while you still have a soul.”
The latter spoken to a young Wilson, who shows no sign of ever having had a soul or wanting one.
In The Good Shepherd a great film artist uses a bunch of other great artists to illustrate an important, if not inherently dramatic, situation. If he’d thrown in some character development, some dilemmas and an actual story, it might be worth watching. Alas, this film is not a sleeper, but a snoozer.
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