The Good Shepherd
2006
**½
Director: Robert De Niro
Cast: Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie, William Hurt, Alec Baldwin, Robert De Niro, Billy Crudup, Michael Gambon, Timothy Hutton, Joe Pesci, John Turturro
Eric Roth's ambitious screenplay, which spent ten years in development, explores the birth of CIA through the fictional Edward Wilson, who is partly based on James Jesus Angleton. He is recruited from Yale and groomed into a counterintelligence specialist during and after WW2. This quiet and serious man learns very quickly that he shouldn't trust anyone. In his second film behind the camera Robert De Niro creates a palpable sense of Cold War paranoia and conveys the brutality of the spy game with a few powerful scenes. However, his drama is ridiculously long and the personal half of the story fails as spectacularly as the Bay of Pigs invasion in the beginning of the film because a stoic bureaucrat who doesn't take joy in anything cannot function as the emotional centre of the story. His wife (Angelina Jolie in a thankless role) is supposed to represent softer family values, but this unpleasant character coerces Wilson to marry her and then spends the rest of the time whining. The cast is impressive, but apart from Matt Damon they have very little to do. And Damon himself does even less; he plays a man who keeps everything inside, and the performance is either perfectly controlled or incredibly wooden.
