'Good Shepherd' Taps Into Blue-Blooded Vein of Secrecy
Matt Damon plays a coldhearted CIA agent in Robert De Niro's convoluted spy tale.
(By Andrew Schwartz)
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Friday, December 22, 2006
Gentlemen do not read each other's mail, unless of course they don't want to be wiped off the face of the Earth. Thus was born the Office of Strategic Services in 1942 and then the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947, expressly to read other gentlemen's mail.
But once you enter that neck of the woods, the problems do not go away. They multiply. Who reads the mail of our fellows who read the other fellows' mail? And who reads their mail? And on and on it goes, a wilderness of penetrated missives called counterintelligence, and that is the subject proper of Robert De Niro's brilliant if uncompromising movie "The Good Shepherd."
The film is a roman a clef loosely linked to a CIA officer of some fame named James Jesus Angleton -- code name "Mother" -- who became head of the company's counterintelligence division, and thus was tasked with reading the mail of our mail-readers. He was brilliant and dedicated, but maybe he read a little too much mail by the end. His job was to find the goblins in the woodpile, and by the end he saw goblins under every log. The movie's impossible mission, which it decides to accept, is to explain this to us.
De Niro's film is a long and tricky thing to sit through, as are most movies about true espionage, as opposed to movies about blowing stuff up. It helps if you've read John le Carre and Charles McCarry, and it helps if you're a kind of Agency groupie (I am), who brings to the experience a nostalgia for the bad old days of the Berlin Tunnel and the coups of South America, when spies wore narrow-brim hats, Brooks Brothers suits (then patriotically made in America and never sold in outlet malls), Florsheims and horn-rims. Do you know who Dick Bissell was? What about William Harvey? Lacking that knowledge, you may find yourself lost in a hall of mirrors. But what helps best is seeing it twice.
As the film (from a screenplay by Eric Roth) has it, Edward Wilson (Matt Damon) is from one of those old families -- you know, the ones who knew everybody, got the best jobs and knew which wine went with which course. Ever notice their lapels? They never bunched up when they sat down, like yours or mine did. They had drape, and that's the giveaway right there.
Anyhow, one day Edward's father takes a gun and blows his brains to scrambled eggs and arterial spatter pattern right there in the big house by the sea. Edward found the suicide note (he was 8 at the time). He hid it and never told a soul. He was the boy who could keep secrets, and he became the man who could keep secrets.
The thrust of the film is his journey from that boy on that tragic day to the Agency player of the '60s, charged with discovering the name of a "visitor." The visitor would be the one who told the Cubans which beach the invaders would hit, so the forces could be massed there upfront. To do that, like George Smiley in the classic "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy," he has to go forward and backward through the records, sifting, weighing, interviewing, trying to read the clues and locate the enemy within his own house. The investigation is the "now" of the movie, but it stops to wander through history, tracking what may be Edward's growth or what may be his damnation, and it is a function of De Niro's classical reticence that he lets you determine which. It's not a tub-thumping, anti-CIA screed, I'm happy to report, but at the same time it's not a gung-ho patriotic extravaganza about the moral certainty of our side.
Damon is superbly disciplined in the role. He's not Burton's Lemas sweating bullets in "The Spy Who Came In From the Cold" but more like Guinness's Smiley in the BBC's "Tinker, Tailor," a quiet, repressed scholar, looking for contradictions and paradoxes.
Severely buttoned-down as well as connected, he was talent-spotted at Yale, where his gift for poetry got him noticed; he was quickly scooped up by OSS. (De Niro himself plays an avuncular version of OSS and CIA founder William Donovan.) Edward serves in England, where he learns how hard the trade can be. One of his friends is a charmer named Arch Cummings (Billy Crudup), who specializes in rubbing out homosexuals on general principle. If this bothers Edward, he never shows it. He never shows anything -- love, fear, pain, disappointment. His face is like the surface of a Chinese vase, aglow with luster, devoid of emotion.
For the movie, the secret life comes out of a culture of secrecy and privilege, not just a sense of duty. It makes the point that in some ways, the early agency was an extension of Yale's Skull and Bones Soc -- oops, all the janitors just left the building! -- Society, that druidically inspired boys club that seems to encourage its members to (a) rule the world and (b) urinate wherever they choose -- and come to think of it, maybe they are the same thing. In any event, "The Good Shepherd" makes a good case for the secrecy of the organization: It has to stay secret, because if we knew how stupid it all was, we'd laugh it out of existence.
As anthropology and archaeology, the film is first-class. If old WASP high Anglican haberdashery was the dullest, tweediest cavalcade of threads ever conceived, the movie certainly understands this. The suits fit beautifully and look like mud on asphalt, the shoes are both shiny and dull, nobody has the wit to wear a Burberry but only those sacklike London Fog single-breasted raincoats and the little '50s small-brimmed hat, usually with the tail feather of a Bavarian woodcock in the band. Color? These guys never heard of it!
The emotional argument is less persuasive: It is that keeping secrets grinds a man down. As a trajectory of feelings, the movie suggests that the higher Edward goes, the less he feels. If that sounds familiar, it should; "The Good Shepherd" most resembles "Godfather II," not only in its scope but in its density, the classic calm of its camera style, the gravity of its cinematography, and the character arc is similar. Like Michael Corleone, Edward Wilson has to destroy his family to save it. This happens in both the professional and the private worlds: His marriage to Clover (an underused Angelina Jolie) turns into a farce, though it produces a son so beautiful he could model underwear for Abercrombie & Fitch. Edward Jr. (Eddie Redmayne) wants to be a spy like dad, but he doesn't have dad's reticence or his cryogenically frozen heart. It is Ed Jr.'s failure as a robot that animates the thriller aspect of the story, while at the same time Edward rethinks his most puzzling case, which dominates the second half of the film.
And that was the case of the conflicting double agents. Traitor, traitor, who's got the traitor? As the real Angleton believed in a Russian defector named Golitsyn, so does the fictional Edward believe in the Russian defector named Valentin Mironov (John Sessions), even when, as happened in both cases, another defector arrived to convince other authorities that the first defector was a KGB plant. This whole mess was like playing chess underwater in sunglasses, and even now, nobody's sure who was telling the truth and who wasn't. The issue is said to have crippled the agency for years, and indeed the term "wilderness of mirrors," later the title of a book on the conundrum, was coined by Angleton himself to describe the situation, drawing the line from Eliot's "Gerontion."
"The Good Shepherd" -- the title reflects Edward's idealized view of his mission and may or may not be, as you decide yourself, ironic -- is serious adult moviemaking, a truly surprising effort from De Niro whose only other film ("A Bronx Tale") seemed more connected to him. But he's a man deeply interested in the art, craft and psychology of espionage. He seems to believe that we'd better be interested in it, because it's interested in us.
The Good Shepherd (135 minutes, at area theaters) is rated R for violence, sexuality and language.