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Trailer for "The Good Shepherd"

You might think that this is a particularly opportune time for a film about the birth and development of the Central Intelligence Agency. In the five years since the 9/11 attacks, the CIA has received more public scrutiny—most of it disapproving—than in its previous almost 54 years of existence.

You might expect that actor Robert DeNiro, who directed The Good Shepherd, and is said to have wanted to make the film for years, would seize the opportunity to come up with something strongly relevant and challenging in its depiction of the agency and its mission. You might, but if you go to his movie you’re likely to find that it disappoints those expectations. The movie is an obscurantist mess, a tediously evasive curiosity.

DeNiro and writer Eric Roth’s device is to tell a story of the first 20 years of the agency’s history by following the career of a mid- to high-level official. They move in and out of sequences in the professional and personal life of Edward Wilson (Matt Damon), from his student years at Yale at the end of the 1930s to the Kennedy administration’s Cuban invasion debacle in 1961. It’s a reasonable idea, but the execution is so muddled and annoying that it has to be seen to be believed, although I don’t recommend this choice.

Edward is a waspy, New England aristo who wants to write poetry, but winds up being recruited by the FBI to spy on his Nazi-sympathizing prof (Michael Gambon). His motivation, curiously enough, seems to have more to do with his discovery that the older man has misappropriated someone else’s poem than with his own anti-fascist beliefs.

This sets the tone for the movie’s elaborate vagueness and perverse historical perspective. There’s nary a word about the US government’s reckless anti-Communist hunts, which were ongoing during this period.

Edward becomes a wartime member of the OSS (the movie doesn’t mention this name, however) and then joins the CIA at its inception after the war. DeNiro and Roth have substituted one Bill Sullivan (played by DeNiro) for Wild Bill Donovan, the actual founder of both organizations.

Throughout, the movie is maddeningly reticent about real events. The filmmakers have substituted an atmospheric, psychologistic approach for specific historical contexts. Edward is portrayed as a man who struggles with questions of loyalty, ethics and patriotism. He confronts these with a class viewpoint that assumes superiority over Jews, Negroes and other lesser breeds. This is the movie’s one real insight, but as written and performed by Damon, the character comes across as an affectless, inbred prig with occasional pangs of regret. I can’t recall a more inhibited, mannered performance by a leading actor.

The whole film is suffused with oppressive atmospherics, as if it were really telling a story about personal tragedy and a national blight. But almost nothing in the narrative makes much sense, and DeNiro and Roth seem to have overlooked most of what was going on during those years. The CIA was conspiring against other nations’ governments (Guatemala, Iran), helping to foment war (Vietnam) and aiding brutal relationships.

DeNiro wants us to understand that bad stuff was going on. Edward’s character and soul become more deformed as the years pass, but the director has worked all this out as if he were remaking the first two Godfather films. (Francis Ford Coppola is a producer.) All he winds up with is a kind of dank, dirty lyricism.

The Good Shepherd isn’t just convolutedly inept. However good the motivation behind it, its politics are lousy.