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| Angelina Jolie as Clover; Matt Damon as the inscrutable Ed Wilson |
[WARNING: spoilers.]
2006's "The Good Shepherd" was a film that totally slipped under my radar until my buddy Mike suggested I give it a watch. It was directed by none other than Robert De Niro, and it stars a huge ensemble cast of big names, all looking younger, and many of which you'll recognize: Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie, Robert De Niro, Alec Baldwin, William Hurt, Joe Pesci, John Turturro, Billy Crudup, Tammy Blanchard, Michael Gambon, Timothy Hutton, John Sessions, Keir Dullea (David Bowman in "2001" and "2010"), Martina Gedeck, Gabriel Macht, Lee Pace, Eddie Redmayne, Tommy Nelson, Mark Ivanir, Oleg Stefan, and Liya Kebede. By focusing on one person, Edward Wilson (Damon), the film tells the story of the beginnings of American international counterintelligence, i.e., the CIA. Edward Wilson is based on two real-life people: James Jesus Angleton and Richard Bissell. Because director De Niro and screenwriter Eric Roth took so many liberties with actual history (there's much in the story that the CIA's own historians dispute), the film shouldn't be taken as a serious attempt at history but more as a fable with a moral message consistent with De Niro's leftism.
The story skips back and forth between the 1930s/40s and the 1960s, chronicling America's movement toward and entry into World War II, the disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs operation that took place on John F. Kennedy's watch, and the Cold War tensions that arose between the United States and the Soviet Union. Through a nonlinear narrative, we watch Edward Wilson—a stoic, unexpressive young man with an ear for poetry, an eye for detail, flexible morals when it comes to human relationships, and a probable love of country (hence the film's title)—rise from his college years in the secretive Skull and Bones fraternity to prominence in the counterintelligence community. He see Edward's relationship with the deaf Laura (Blanchard), which deteriorates when he meets Margaret "Clover" Russell (Jolie), who aggressively seduces Edward and gets pregnant, prompting Edward to drop Laura and marry Clover. Having earlier expressed openness to the idea of working counterintelligence, Edward is immediately called overseas to England; there, he meets a former Yale poetry professor named Fredericks (Gambon), whom Edward had at first thought was a Nazi sympathizer. Edward discovers that Fredericks, who had seemed creepily homosexual at first, is in fact a veteran British counterintelligence asset on the verge of leaving the business but not quite ready to do so. Another British agent, Arch Cummings (Crudup), warns that Fredericks is in fact homosexual, and his various libertine dalliances may have resulted in the leaking of information. Fredericks warns Edward to leave the business while he still has a soul; the old professor is assassinated not long after. Meanwhile, Edward has been away from his sickly, nervous son Edward Jr. for several years (Nelson, then Redmayne). Edward Jr. is the product of a loveless union between Margaret and Edward; he grows up wanting to please both of his parents, and he eventually expresses a desire to join counterintelligence like his father. It is heavily implied that the Bay of Pigs operation (to overthrow Castro) became known to the Soviets when Edward Jr. talked about it to his lover Miriam (Kebede), a French-speaking Soviet asset who, despite truly falling in love with Edward Jr., is eventually considered too dangerous and is killed—thrown out of a plane before her marriage to Edward Jr.—on Edward Sr.'s orders. Edward Sr. also has to contend with double agents, shady FBI guys (Baldwin), and his Russian counterpart codenamed "Ulysses" (Stefan), who is apparently obsessed with Edward—or who at least seems to think of Edward as one of his few close friends.
The film's tone is subdued, murky, and quiet. The pacing is slow and deliberate, a slow burn reminiscent of espionage movies like "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy." The narrative moves back and forth among the 30s, the 60s, and the 40s, with the characters seemingly changing not at all in appearance (the clues to which decade you're in come from title cards, clothing styles, architecture, and historical events; some time-transitions are obvious while others are subtle and sudden). The overall effect is that of a morally muddled pastiche, which I'm sure was De Niro's aim. He wants to show how dirty the counterintelligence business is, and how even one's own son can become an intelligence liability, inadvertently (or purposely?!) compromising important operations as superpowers jostle for advantage. In one telling scene, a Russian appears, claiming to be Valentin Mironov, but the Americans are already working with a man claiming to be Mironov, so this new Russian is beaten, waterboarded, and drugged with LSD to force him to confess his true name. When he doesn't do so but instead insists he is Mironov before throwing himself out of a window, Edward has the sickening realization that the Mironov he thought he knew has been a double this entire time. Of course, none of this is personal; it's all merely part of the Great Game being played by the US and the USSR.
Casting so many diverse actors made for some interesting, and not always successful, dynamics. One of the film's weirder twists was the casting of veddy English Eddie Redmayne as the American Edward Wilson Jr. while casting the Amurrican Billy Crudup as the markedly British Archibald Cummings, who turns out to be in league with the fake Valentin Mironov mentioned earlier. I didn't read any complaints about Redmayne's generically American accent, but I saw a lot of online talk from the English section of cyberspace about how awful Billy Crudup's British accent was—horrific and distractingly awful according to some. I don't have an ear for such things, but I had a suspicion about Crudup since most Brits will often complain about most Americans' British accents in movies (Peter Sarsgaard in "An Education" apparently fared better, although his accent wasn't perfect, either). Angelina Jolie was also an interesting casting choice. I'm not sure her character, Margaret/Clover, really worked for me. I don't really blame Jolie, who is a talented actress, as much as I blame De Niro for his directorial choices. When we first meet Clover at a posh Skull and Bones gathering, she locks eyes with Edward (who is currently seeing the deaf Laura), and by the end of the evening, she's ridden him like a horse and, as it turns out later, gotten herself pregnant, thus forcing Edward to "do the right thing" and marry her. Edward is immediately called away for duty, and both he and Clover end up having affairs. By the time they meet again, Margaret (who no longer uses the nickname Clover) is a different woman—calmer, sadder, more sedate, and desirous of moving out west to be with her mother. Edward, meanwhile, remains as closed as ever—an asset in his chosen field but the kiss of death for a marriage that ideally should have been founded on love, not a fearful sense of duty and propriety.
If anything, the evolution of Edward's relationship with his wife and son is probably the best and easiest way to track the film's story over time. I assume De Niro and Roth crafted this nonlinear narrative as a way of showing the brokenness of lives lived in the midst of silence and evasiveness instead of openness and truth. Spycraft might be a necessary evil, but it's definitely evil in how it ruins lives. Damon's performance as Edward Wilson requires him to be silent most of the time, avoiding eye contact not out of timidity, but out of a desire never to expose his true feelings. This allows other people around him to project their own thoughts and desires onto him as if he were a sort of blank canvas. I think when Laura first falls for Edward, she sees something in him that doesn't actually exist, and the same goes doubly for Margaret, who thinks she's falling for someone noble and stoic when, in fact, she's falling for someone who's squirrelly and secretive—a true spy. A German interpreter who turns out to be a Soviet double agent (Gedeck) may also have made the same mistake. Edward has her killed.
Overall, I'm not sure how much I liked "The Good Shepherd." The one point of suspense for me came when it was discovered that Edward's son, Edward Jr., has given the Soviets the date and location of the Bay of Pigs operation. Edward Sr. has a choice at that point, according to his Soviet counterpart Ulysses: side with his son to protect him or side with his country. I could see Edward's decision coming from a mile away because the film's title is "The Good Shepherd": of course someone like Edward will choose his country over his son. He's a quiet version of Jack Bauer, more concerned about the greater good than about those closest to him.
For fans of slow-paced spy thrillers and fans of on-the-nose didactic messages about the corrosive effects of counterintelligence on the human soul, I can cautiously recommend "The Good Shepherd" as a fairly intelligent, if somewhat tonally awkward and frequently preachy, movie to watch. For everyone else, though, this was a slow-paced, occasionally predictable film that held me at an emotional distance and didn't evoke strong emotions in me, partly because of the fractured-narrative approach and partly because the movie's underlying message was all too obvious. I can't honestly recommend this film, but it was nevertheless educational to watch something directed by Robert De Niro. Sorry, Mike.
