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What sort of people want to be spies? What kind of people flourish in that shadowy, deep-cover world? The answer is: damaged people, people with a talent - and a need - for secrets. John Le Carré's more agnostic readers, for example, believe that the best-selling author's careers in both spying and spy fiction are explained, not by anything in the wider world of history, but by the painful story of Le Carré's own absentee father, and his career in confidence trickery, flim-flam and fraud. Spying as a matter of honour is a way of creatively managing the memory of shame. An intensively imagined spies' world of duplicity, secrecy and betrayal is a way of creating a lenient new context for banal, private sins, and promoting them in status to flawed heroism or even tragedy.
- The Good Shepherd
- Production year: 2006
- Country: USA
- Cert (UK): 15
- Runtime: 167 mins
- Directors: Robert De Niro
- Cast: Angelina Jolie, Billy Crudup, Joe Pesci, Matt Damon, Robert De Niro
This sceptical, psychoanalytic approach to spying is what appears to govern Robert De Niro's big, solemn, self-consciously epic fiction about the birth of the CIA from the second world war to the Bay of Pigs debacle in 1961. As drafted by blue-chip Hollywood screenwriter Eric Roth, who also wrote The Insider, Ali and Munich, it's a movie which steams along like an aircraft carrier: slow, deliberate, often painfully unable to manoeuvre, but capable - just occasionally - of firing off some very big guns.
At its centre is the fictionalised figure of Edward Wilson, played by the eternally boyish and semi-wooden Matt Damon, who by the end of this very long film has presumably hidden a picture of an aged, balding Matt Damon in the attic somewhere. He's the clean-cut A-student at Yale in the 1930s, who is invited to join the Skull and Bones, the ultra-elite secret society for America's future Wasp governing class, now famous, or notorious, for having both Bush Sr and Jr among the alumni. It is at one of their weekend Bones retreats, held in a weird sort of bamboo hut complex resembling a Honolulu vacation resort, that Wilson is recruited to join the new wartime intelligence outfit by a top military honcho, nicely played in a returning cameo by De Niro himself.
Edward rises to become the very embodiment of the agency: patriotic, fiercely motivated, utterly dedicated. But behind the career glory, there are secrets. Edward once had a sweetly platonic romance with a hearing-impaired woman called Laura (Tammy Blanchard) which was ruined when Margaret (Angelina Jolie), the sexy, predatory sister of one of his fellow Bonesmen, entrapped him into marriage by getting pregnant.
And he has a yet more intimate, horrifically traumatic secret. When Edward was a boy, his career public-servant father shot himself due to some unspecified disgrace, just minutes after calling his son into his study for an unforgettable homily on the importance of truth at all times. The six-year-old Edward found the suicide note on the body, and hid it away from his mother. To this day, the adult Edward keeps the sealed, unread letter in his private safe, where it festers, seeding in the grown-up boy a muddled psychological need to serve his country in the most stout-hearted, redemptive way possible, but also somehow in a career that seamlessly extends, transforms and exonerates the world of secrets and lies. Everything comes to a head with the catastrophe of the anti-Castro adventure in 1961 and the leaks are being blamed on someone in Wilson's department.
There are clever and suggestively subtle things in Roth's script: some internal rhymes which stitch it together with the slenderest of thread. The hearing aid of an attractive German translator in post-war Berlin tacitly reminds Edward (and us) of poor, scorned Laura - and Wilson sleeps with her. When Wilson's Soviet opposite number reveals that the Russians' code name for him is "Mother", we cut to Edward's own son, a delicate, highly-strung youth calling Jolie "mother" in a reedy, even shrill voice.
De Niro and Roth send us some - how can I put this? - pretty mixed signals about this son. He is traumatised by his parents' arguing. As an infant, he wets himself at a Christmas party (a shrewd, tender moment). And as a willowy teen, he compliments his mother on her gown, saying she looks "lovely". Now, what else is this kid going to do? Flower-arranging? A course in personal grooming? Is he going to get a job as Barbra Streisand's personal assistant? Well, no: he joins the service, of course, and falls in love. With a woman. I can't help thinking that De Niro and Roth are dancing around a certain issue about the male world of spying and secrets and can't bring themselves to, as it were, come out with it.
And why is Damon allowed to act in such a callow, boring way? As ever, he looks like he is playing Robin to some imaginary Batman at his side, like Jimmy Stewart and his invisible rabbit. His nasal, unobtrusive voice makes every line sound the same. He could say: "Darling, I love you more than anything else in the world" and "I'd like Diet Coke, not regular Coke, with these fries" and they would be indistinguishable.
This is a very dark, murky film, resentfully critical of the dysfunctional CIA family. It appears occasionally to be aspiring to the anti-grandeur of the Godfather movies, especially with scenes set in Cuban Miami - a nice small part for Joe Pesci, incidentally, as a casino-owner, bringing this talented actor out of self-imposed semi-retirement, although I suspect he contributed an awful lot more which has been cut. But it takes hours and hours to get to the point, and that point, when it comes, has been blunted by an awful lot of ponderous acting and a laboured, stuffy sense of historical importance.
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