The Good Shepherd

Posted by Robert Fure (robert@filmschoolrejects.com) on December 20, 2006

The Good Shepherd I was trying to kick around a few clever things to say but all I came up with was “Don’t call it the Good German” and “Was it a good Shepherd.” Yeah both of those suck. Luckily for me, and you, and the world, and Matt Damon, and Robert DeNiro, this movie did not suck. In fact, it was quite good.

The plot of The Good Shepherd follows Edward Wilson (Damon) through his years, starting out as a promising young college student. As with all colleges, communists are bound to pop up and try to subvert the system and the FBI taps Wilson to spy on a college professor. He does well. Really well.

After an initiation into the Skulls (yeah, the ones you’ve heard about) and some rocky relationship roads between a woman he really loves and the hot, but borderline crazy Angelina Jolie, he ends up married to Jolie and does the only rational thing. Hooks up with the OSS, the military’s intelligence service.

He dables in the Bay of Pigs, which goes disastrously and suspiciously wrong. He flirts with his rival Soviet intelligence officer and gains a reputation for being a man carved of stone. On the home front, his wife Margaret (Jolie) turns to the booze for comfort while raising their son alone.

I don’t want to give away too much plot. If you’re at all interested in this movie, go see it. You’ll like it. If you’re semi-interested, hell, go see it anyways. It’s good. We bounce around exotic spy locations like Germany, Cuba, and Africa and all with good reason. We see double-crosses and fake outs. The movie lacks action but piles on the drama and treats the audience with respect. The movie hides things from you and just about when you’ve figured it out, the movie knows you have and just gives you the answer. It’s smart like that.

Damon gives one of his better performances I feel and really locks the whole film down. John Turturro’s character is also really good. The only bad acting in this comes from Angelina Jolie who is no longer capable of being anyone but Angelina Jolie to me and I’m sure many others. When we first meet here she’s supposed to be young but seems old, like she is. When her and Damon are on screen together it feels like The Graduate 2. Her performance gets better further into the movie as her character’s age catches up to her own and her alcoholism takes over.

The direction is solid and the film has a good pace. There is some CGI sprinkled in and some of it could use a re-render or some new texture, but it’s few and far between. The score is also pretty sweet and the cinematography is spot on most of the time.

This is a movie you should check out. I really liked it. It was tight, haute, and nice. Damon really earns some points with me here and I can’t wait to watch this again.

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Joaquin Font

The Good Shepherd, in its deliberateness and concentration on the question of power and moral corruption at the political and personal levels, is extremely well written, gorgeously shot, and its performances, by a great car, are powerfully directed. Damon isn't "cold", he is in fact full of feeling at every moment, but like the ship in a bottle he plays with, his world is contained and suffocating, his world is about underacting then--which explains Damon's and De Niro's treatment of him. People have mentioned the similarity to the Godfather, but The Last Tycoon offers a better model: people whose life is about show lose their way, they cannot direct themselves, and follow power's drift. A great film then, and one by the way that really offers insight into how people like the Bushes got their power.

I suspect that a lot of the reviewers of this film have not sat through it a second, let a lone a third or a fourth time. For example, the reviewer who says that it's funny that De Niro's character says he belives in Democracy is totally missing the point: as Damon has noted about his character, these people did not believe they were doing anything wrong, they thought even that they were preventing wars. And De Niro's character is simply repeating the same lesson Damon's British spymaster has already imparted in the film: being democratic in a ruthelessly elite "club" is a weakness.

The film has numerous such details in its plot and dialogue which reveal themsleves on closer inspection. I hope viewers will look at it at least three or four times. De Niro and Eric Roth and Richardson are old hands, their technique is subtle, like fine wine: it needs to be savored in the proper way.

And oh yes, there are rough edges in this film, but that's life, and the minor imperfections only make this project more human. I think the film needed more slowness to create a stronger rhythm. But this is the new millenium. No time and money for that. In the seventies, this script would have been shot better. But again, we as viewers can compensate for the film's compression by watching it repeatedly, dwelling more in its time.

My congratulations to Mr. De Niro and all of his collaborators on this film.

The Good Shepherd

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