The Good Shepherd

[December 20th, 2006] Nearly a decade after Good Will Hunting, Matt Damon sure could use another shrink. As he's moved away from playing gifted brats, Damon has begun to specialize in crabbed, clogged men who couldn't locate their feelings with two hands and a flashlight. Jason Bourne, his action-franchise hero, has the convenient excuse of amnesia (you can't emote about what you can't remember), but the blockage has reached new extremes in Damon's latest films. In The Departed, Damon's Colin Sullivan is sent by a mad mobster to infiltrate the Massachusetts police, and winds up so withdrawn that he loses his girlfriend to Leonardo DiCaprio—a worthy opponent, but still. And now, as CIA spook Edward Wilson in The Good Shepherd, the actor shrinks steadily throughout the movie, eventually hiding so completely behind his Coke-bottle glasses that he resembles a government-sanctioned Elmer Fudd, off to hunt the wascally Communists.

When John Turturro's Army liaison finds Wilson behind a desk in post-World War II Berlin, he recognizes his new boss immediately: "They told me you were a humorless SOB. There can't be two of you." Actually, The Good Shepherd, a fictionalized history of the birth of the CIA, is populated almost entirely by self-serious bureaucrats. Robert De Niro, directing his second picture, is aiming for a WASP Godfather—and he might have succeeded completely, if not for one fatal miscalculation. He forgets that when Northeast bluebloods are at their most secretive and sinister, they're also at their most unintentionally hilarious. Try not to laugh when Wilson enters the clandestine chambers of Yale's Skull and Bones Society—and is introduced to naked mud wrestling and the Whiffenpoofs, a men's singing group. An a cappella men's singing group. A group that sings, "We're little black sheep that have gone astray. Baa! Baa! Baa!" This is, perhaps, not the stuff of great tragedy.

Aside from this serious misstep, though, The Good Shepherd is a powerful achievement. Edward Wilson is based significantly on James Angleton, the insomniac, paranoid, virtuoso founder of the CIA's counterintelligence branch. Angleton seems to have thought himself the one loyal American in a world of turncoats, and De Niro and Damon paint Wilson as equally distrustful, surrounded as he is by Russian double agents, American triple agents and Russian quadruple agents. By the time he returns from Europe, Wilson is even keeping secrets from his wife (Angelina Jolie) and son (Eddie Redmayne)—who, ominously, joins the CIA as well.

No movie has ever shown so clearly how patriotism can be warped into a perverse White Man's Burden. When Wilson strong-arms a Mafia boss (Joe Pesci) into informing on his associates, the man waxes eloquent on the native traditions of the Italian, Irish and Jewish communities—and asks what the WASPs have to compare. "We have this country," Wilson says. "The rest of you are just visiting." Sounds like a pretty funny country. And an empty one. R.