De Niro recounts CIA's birth in lengthy "Shepherd"

By Kirk Honeycutt

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Who knew Robert De Niro had such a keen fascination for foreign policy and espionage?

"The Good Shepherd," his first directorial effort since his debut feature, "A Bronx Tale" (1993), is a thoroughly knowledgeable, carefully researched account of the founding and development of the CIA from World War II through the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961. While a bit unwieldy at nearly three hours and at times slow going, the film is absolutely fascinating for anyone who shares De Niro's passions.

To attract moviegoers beyond the foreign-policy crowd, he has recruited stars and top actors led by Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie and borrowed the trappings of spy thrillers, though the film certainly leans more toward John le Carre than Ian Fleming. The problem with marketing the film centers on the problem of the film itself. De Niro and writer Eric Roth are never clear on their intentions: Is this a thriller with a historical background or history with dollops of intrigue and adventurism?

In this film, as well as last year's "Munich," Roth seems to be operating between the genre cracks with political films in the mode of early Costa Gavras that deploy Hitchcockian techniques without romantic characters or situations.

The movie follows the spy career of Edward Wilson (Damon), a privileged male of the white patrician class. The character is modeled, right down to his interest in poetry, on James Angleton, who co-founded the CIA. It's accurate in most things but has the patina of fiction, which allows the filmmakers to imagine and speculate about things that perhaps will always remain secret.

At Yale in 1939, Wilson joins the clandestine Skull and Bones society, a brotherhood meant to incubate future American leadership. (The 2004 Republican and Democratic presidential candidates belong.) Roth makes crystal clear that the penchant for utter secrecy and sense of entitlement fostered by the Skull and Bones carry over into its members' work in government.

At the behest of an Army general (De Niro), Wilson joins the Office of Strategic Services during WWII. This sends him to London, where his mentor, Dr. Fredericks (Michael Gambon), teaches him the fine art of counterintelligence. Yet his last piece of advice to Wilson before Fredericks is murdered -- "Get out while you still have a soul" -- goes unheeded.

The movie unfolds in flashbacks from the Bay of Pigs incident, which severely compromises the CIA and Wilson's career. While diligently trying to ferret out the turncoat who relayed invasion plans to the Cubans, Wilson reflects back on his life. What is clear to the viewer, but not to Wilson himself, is how paranoia rules his actions and how self-righteousness blinds him to opinions and desires of others, including his family.

He weds Margaret "Clover" Russell (Jolie), the sister and daughter of a fellow Skull and Bonesmen, in a polite shotgun marriage. The union proves loveless right from the start since Wilson has thrown over his true soulmate (Tammy Blanchard). He doesn't meet his son Edward Jr. until age 6 when he returns home from Europe. The son consequently will wish to win his father's love by emulating him -- with disastrous consequences.

The OSS gets transformed into the CIA with the onset of the Cold War. At work, Wilson's obsessions with double agents and a mole within Langley dominate his relationships with people there, including CIA director Philip Allen (William Hurt); Sam Murach (Alec Baldwin), the rough-and-tumble agent who first recruited him; his blue-collar assistant Ray Brocco (John Turturro); and British spy Arch Cummings (Billy Crudup), whose Cambridge-upper-class heritage mirrors the backgrounds of the good old boys of the CIA.

Wilson's secret weapon is silence. He watches and listens but reveals little. Yet he has one outburst in the movie in an interview with a Mafia don (Joe Pesci), when Wilson says the USA belongs to the WASPs, and everyone else -- Italians, Jews, Irish and blacks -- are mere visitors. While Wilson probably would never say such a thing aloud, it captures the mind-set perfectly.

The sum of the parts might not add up to a great movie, but "Good Shepherd" is a pretty good one. Some scenes hit you with the impact of a bullet. And it probably took an actor of De Niro's caliber to get his stars to tone down their onscreen personas to play genuine roles.

Damon here is not Jason Bourne. No one bothers to age his character, which becomes a distraction when he looks like a drinking buddy to his own son, but this character is a ruthless, insufferable bastard who buried his emotions when his father committed suicide.

Jolie here is not Lara Croft or Mrs. Smith but the once-sassy, now long-suffering wife of a spook. And so it goes through the cast, with only Gambon playing what you might call a fictional movie character, but it fits the role to a T.

Designer Jeannine Oppewall and costume designer Ann Roth bring to life the shadowy world of espionage both in Europe and the East Coast. Cinematographer Robert Richardson gives the film a moodiness and edginess that the score by Marcelo Zarvos and Bruce Fowler --with overtones of Philip Glass -- highlight.

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter

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