Review

Review Date: 31-December-06
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Just OK

The Good Shepherd (2006)

"The Good Shepherd" opens with a sex act caught on blurry videotape with scratchy audio accompaniment, which pops up throughout the film as a recurring motif. This titbit is apparently used to electrify an essentially dispassionate tale. I'm surprised it wasn't shown in the movie's trailer; then again, that focused on the birth of the CIA, which is probably electrifying to some. Yet that angle is also a tease. "The Good Shepherd" tries to incorporate the racy video and does cover some history of American intelligence, but it chiefly concerns a very dry man whose life was clouded in lies.

Matt Damon stars as Edward Wilson, the titular shepherd whose goodness is highly debatable. Beginning as a middle-aged counterintelligence officer after the US' failure in Cuba, he pauses to reflect on the path that brought him to this point in life. While a taciturn poetry student at Yale, he was recruited into the Skull & Bones society and found the family he'd been missing since his father's suicide when he was a boy. He also attracted the notice of his thesis advisor (Michael Gambon) and an FBI agent (Alec Baldwin) who had secrets they wanted him to share. From there it snowballed: he was courted by the WASP elite to join the OSS fresh out of college, went to London to learn the tricks of the espionage trade (some of them harsher than others), returned home after the Allied victory, and launched into the Cold War under the new auspices of the CIA. At every step he remained as introverted and impassive as ever, even as he became a master at his craft. Despite Damon's talent, this renders a protagonist about whose welfare it's difficult to care.

Maybe much of the CIA's activity in the '50s and '60s is still classified, but in any case director Robert De Niro (who plays the organization's founder) and screenwriter Eric Roth don't imagine Wilson's doings too elaborately. (Or do they? I admit to being confused by the details.) The story's main conflict is not between the US and the communists, but between Wilson and whatever humanity exists within him. In this arena he grapples with a wife he barely knows (Angelina Jolie), a son he has barely seen (Eddie Redmayne), the lost love of his life (Tammy Blanchard), and a Soviet agent with whom he enjoys an odd camaraderie (Oleg Stefan). Just like every other spy/G-man movie, "The Good Shepherd" illustrates the obvious point that people in such fields do not have the right to love and family, because their real devotion must be to ego, obsession, bloodlust, or whatever it is that makes a body choose such a warped existence. Wilson's connection to the world is founded on manipulation of the truth and his own emotions, until at last (when the video is explained) he's nothing more than a monster. But since he started out a cipher, this doesn't feel like a particularly tragic fall.

"The Good Shepherd" is a long movie composed of a clinical elegance with few ups and downs. Who could really enjoy it? Only fans of Cold War history, I suspect. The rest of us are apt to be numbed by its inherent cold.

Copyright © 2006 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.