Review: ‘Good Shepherd’ deglamorizes Cold War-era espionage

Directed by: Robert De Niro

Starring: Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie, William Hurt, Alec Baldwin, Oleg Stefan

Rated: R

If you’re a fan of razzle-dazzle spy thrillers packed with glamour and gadgets, car chases and courtesans, chances are “The Good Shepherd” is not going to be your cap of cyanide.

The film – a fictional account (based on fact) of the formation of the CIA – recalls such nuts-and-bolts spy tomes as the novels of Len Deighton and John le Carre, as well as Norman Mailer’s 1,200-plus page “Harlot’s Ghost: A Novel of the CIA.”

The screenplay, written by Eric Roth, does as much to deglamorize the world of Cold War-era espionage as “Trainspotting” did for the wonderful world of drug addiction.

James Bond would not be happy in the role of Edward Wilson, played by Matt Damon. While Wilson does manage to bed a few babes and marry (unhappily so) a wife played by Angelina Jolie, his day-to-day existence as one of the world’s highest-ranking spies comes across as being more like the life of a roadie than a rock star. Damon, who is in virtually every scene of the 168-minute film, gives one of the best, and certainly the most restrained, performances of his career.

Detailed storyline

As the film progresses – with much attention to minute detail – Damon’s Wilson begins to make the audience nervous and uncomfortable. We know what tumult is actually raging somewhere in his psyche no matter how calm, to the point of being drab, he appears on the outside. As a hobby, Wilson spends endless hours fashioning ships and meticulously placing them in bottles. In a subtle way, this says much about the man’s inner workings.

“The Good Shepherd” is set at the time the United States invaded Cuba in April 1961. The Bay of Pigs incident is one of the most infamous, and well documented, debacles in the annals of government-sponsored covert activity. That the CIA’s actions were compromised by internal breaches of security has never been in question, but conspiracy theorists cite the botched invasion as the cause of everything from the Kennedy assassination to the failure of “New Coke” in 1985.

As Wilson is contemplating just what went wrong with the seemingly perfect plan, the story flashes back.

We see that Wilson’s father was a diplomat who possibly had a skeleton in his closet. He ends up with a bullet in his head, put there by his own hand.

Later, while attending Yale, Wilson is inducted into the uber-secret “Skull and Bones Society.”

Wilson drops his thoughts of being a poet and instead gets a job with the Office of Strategic Services – the World War II precursor to the CIA.

Many of the people he met via “Skull and Bones” pop up in this covert world. When the war is over and the American government realizes our former allies, the Russians, might be major contenders on the world-dominance playing field, the CIA becomes a necessity.

The second act of “The Good Shepherd” draws us into a fledgling world of high-tech espionage. Alliances are made. Friendships and loves are formed. All the while, the uneasiness we’ve seen in Wilson begins to permeate all of the characters.

There are a number of emotionally devastating scenes in the final act that won’t be revealed in this review. These moments are almost antithetical to what one expects in climactic scenes of the normal Hollywood spy thriller. But they are even more bone-chilling in their believability.

De Niro’s direction

Robert De Niro is best known for being in the upper echelon of modern-era actors.

As such, he’s done tough, crazy, funny and sociopathic. With such a broad range, and being such an obvious Hollywood “player,” it’s some wonder that he has only directed 1993’s “A Bronx Tale” and co-directed 2001’s “The Score.”

But De Niro learned the art from some of the best – Martin Scorsese, Barry Levinson, Ron Howard – and being such a revered actor has allowed him to assemble a great cast for “The Good Shepherd.” Even the actors with small roles here are obviously happy to be working with him.

The technical crew is no less impressive. Cinematographer Ralph Richardson (“Snow Falling on Cedars,” the “Kill Bill” movies, “Natural Born Killers”) works magic. The look of “The Good Shepherd” is dazzlingly drab, a style that befits the film’s overall tone.

While there’s not a lot of Scorsese-style violence, the scenes of Matt Damon building his ships in bottles chilled me in much the same way as seeing Travis Bickle (De Niro’s character in Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver”) looking in the mirror, pulling his gun, staring himself down and saying, “Are you talking to me?”

Jim Wunderle owns Wunderle Sound Services and is a Springfield freelance writer and musician. He can be reached at info@wunderlesound.com.