The Good Shepherd. Directed by Robert De Niro. Produced by Robert De Niro. Starring Robert De Niro, Matt Damon, Angelina (woof!) Jolie, Alec Baldwin, William Hurt, John Tuturro.
Not to be confused with The Good German. Or The Good Earth. Or The Shepherd of the Hills. This one is drawing in bleats of admiration from critics, mostly I’m thinking the Commies, on account of it illumines—or purports to once again like we needed that—the shadowy middle kingdom of spies and counterspies and that there from the dark origins of spydom in the Office of Strategic Services (once populated—unbelievably—by Iv(or)y League graduates, but they got over their brief flirtation with actual do something, risk something public service and went back to sculling …and Skull—and-Bones—ing: That noblesse oblige stuff, now where’d it get to? …under the sofa? …behind of the chiffonier? …in my Sunday pants?) on to the misty birth of the Central Int… (well, you know what… shhhhhhh!) and thenthrough corruption, subornment, duplicity, mendacity, murder, betrayal, fraud, vanity, and buggery (mostly the British on that last one… urf urf!), you know…patriotism.
Dunno how much of this is supposed to be based on a real personality (or want of one), but De Niro sets before a glorious panorama of America in the thirties, forties, fifties—artfully reconstructed wardrobes, venues, automobiles, and the ill-lit varnished interiors where somber but classy stuff takes place among the old rich of a young nation—the greywash life of a shambling, soulless, unemotional Company Man, Edward Wilson, the whitest white guy God ever set on earth, and ripe grist for the mill of a De Niro, who cannot resist poking a barb into the Old Stock now and again: Wilson tells all immigrants through the icon of an about-to-be-deported Italian mobster (Joe Pesci, looking like Death on a soda cracker and about at the end of his string, mercifully for those who think that his vulgar, brutal dwarf trope has about exhausted its appeal, even to the vulgar and brutal…): “It’s our country. You’re just a tourist.” Wilson shuffles, often wordless and buried behind a huge pair of tortoiseshells evidently designed to make him look twerpy, through life and into espionage by dint of a good mind and pliant character, the which both FBI and mysterious guvamint “others” spot at once during their drive-throughs in New Haven. Angelina Jolie as Clover, spoilt debutante stuffed precariously into a frilly prom dress and trying hard to look virginal, also spots the colorless dweeb with no passion or money or connections or family or prospects, sets her sights (who wouldn’t?) on him, contriving to wrench out of Wilson a love child by which to compel him to marriage. The fruit of that union will return to haunt him. Her. Us. As will everything else and everyone else in this double-bluff, crossover, didn’t-see-that-one-coming, he’s-back, trick-flick. Which we have to guess is how the world of secret agents works.
Yet it’s not the secret agents or secret agentry De Niro focuses on. It’s the administration and organization of spytude and the guys in the silk shirts and Burberrys and wingtips (and tortoiseshells) who from the bowels of the Machine, fromtiny, dim, dusty offices sheafed with papers and folders and reports and invoices belonging to vaporous “import” or anonymous“export” outfits launch the coups and probes, abductions and assassinations that keep us free to suck down Cinnabon ™ and peek up Britney’s skirt even today. Wilson begins his dark durance as a tattle-tale, blowing the whistle—ironically—on an apparently rightwing professor at Yale (last one, too), then moving up into the ranks of the (behind the scenes) OSS in London where (where else?) homosexuality (rightwing, naturally) rears (so to speak) its head, and from that service on after the war into the newly independent (just how independent De Niro will suggest archly) CIA, where he’ll watch the Bay of Pigs incursion collapse… through the ministrations of a mole burrowed deep and ugly and sinister into the core of American intelligence (kinda like Nathaniel Hawthorne… oh, sorry… that’s the other American intelligence). Anyhow. Wilson’s devotion to his clandestine occupation, of course, costs him the nubile Clover annnnnnnd his son, who becomes a sort of renegade agent only to tumble into the clutches of a Rooshan spymaster during the Cold War. What will Dad do? And what about that mole in the Agency? Not one of our Yale guys? C’mon…
This is a tough call. Visually appealing through careful recreation of the period and of the opulent yet crepuscular light—the siennas and sepias and ochres—under which the sort of thing these guys do gets done, the film remains nonetheless the story of a colorless, spiritless, fathomless homunculus who orchestrates but does not play and around whose pallor (translucence, maybe) secondary characters (Jolie, Hurt, Pesci, Tuturro, De Niro even) cluster unable to reflect from an unillumined source. Goes without saying that Damon’s somnambulant take will likely register as “ deftly understated performance.” May I have the envelope, please?