The Good Shepherd

On the evidence of The Good Shepherd, Matt Damon can empty himself out to play a seemingly emotionless character, but cannot add enough flicker of emotion around the edges to make the character interesting enough to watch for three hours. The movie, Robert De Niro's directorial take on the history of the CIA, is a noble failure that should be watched for its intentions but cannot be praised for its execution.

The miscasting of Damon (whom I generally like) is emblematic. It's a tricky role to be sure. Based largely on CIA counter-intelligence chief James Jesus Angleton, and secondarily on Richard M. Bissell, Jr. (not to be confused with the novelist Richard P. Bissell), Damon's Edward Wilson is a cypher from the get-go. Angleton, a paranoid eccentric and poetry aficionado (an angle the movie explores with some zest), is a figure of perennial fascination to anyone writing about the CIA, from either a fictive or non-fictive perspective. But for eccentricity, the screenwriter Eric Roth has largely substituted a Protestant stiffness which Damon dutifully but uninterestingly embodies. The actual Angleton was only half-WASP; his mother was a Mexican high society beauty. (This gets me noodling that Raul Esparza, who can layer bland and edgy, might have brought something telling to this role.)

There is a lot of star casting in The Good Shepherd -- who wouldn't want to work with De Niro? -- which can either work for a movie, as it largely does in Oliver Stone's J.F.K., or backfire badly; this is somewhere in-between. Generally the non-stars -- Tammy Blanchard, Lee Pace, Oleg Stefan -- do more impressive work, although John Turturro registers as Damon's spiritually ugly assistant. Angelina Jolie is, well, Angelina Jolie -- what is it about her that reminds me of Joan Crawford in full star throttle? Even allowing for the zero chemistry of their forced husband and wife relationship in the movie, Damon and Jolie have zero performance chemistry -- nothing to make us care what happens or doesn't happen between these two.

There is nothing wrong with De Niro's work as director, exactly -- it's completely professional -- but it doesn't compel. The Good Shepherd fails a basic Patrick Murtha test of film-making, which is that there should be at least one great scene every 30 minutes, on average. (Really, if The Sopranos can offer a great scene every five minutes, is this so much to ask?) At 167 minutes running time, then, this movie ought to offer a minimum of five or six great scenes. Instead there are, sadly, none. There is one sort-of-great line -- "The rest of you are just visiting" -- for the undoubted sake of which De Niro kept in a scene with Joe Pesci that otherwise would almost surely have wound up on the cutting room floor, since it comes out of nowhere and leads nowhere.

The CIA, with its secret history growing out of other secret histories (Yale's Skull and Bones, featured prominently here), grips certain minds with obsessive force -- Norman Mailer's novel Harlot's Ghost, which apparently overlaps The Good Shepherd considerably in subject matter, weighs in at 1300 pages and ends with the words "To be continued," for goodness sake. De Niro himself hopes to follow The Good Shepherd with two sequels -- and despite all my reservations, I would anticipate those with interest. In the meantime, I need to read Mailer, and Robert Littell's The Company, and watch the six-hour mini-series of the latter with Michael Keaton as Angleton -- maybe I'm in the grip too.

POSTSCRIPT: Re the poetry angle: I figure this is the only Hollywood feature I'll ever see in which Trumbull Stickney is mentioned several times, so I've got to like it at least a little bit on that basis. More on Stickney in another post sometime.

UPDATE (5/17/2009): I eventually watched The Company (and bought a copy of Littell's novel, which I've yet to crack). The mini-series makes for a fascinating comparison with The Good Shepherd, in part because the basic material is so similar, in part because Damon's character in The Good Shepherd is split in The Company into its component parts -- the "all-American boy" agent, and the shadowy behind-the-scenes James Jesus Angleton. This makes more sense than De Niro and Eric Roth trying to fuse two disparate concepts in one character and expecting poor Matt Damon to pull it off.

Here, the Angleton side of the equation couldn't be better, because Michael Keaton is spectacular. (Alfred Molina is also a delight in a key spymaster role, and Rory Cochrane is terrific as one of the younger spies.) But the all-American side founders because Chris O'Donnell, well cast physically, doesn't consistently make us feel the way events weigh on him. His performance actually improves when he gets beyond his actual age; he's at his best in the fifth and sixth hours as a near sixty-year-old.

The whole series was written by Ken Nolan and directed by Mikael Salomon, and benefits from that consistency of personnel, although it does split cleanly into six hour-long units, of which maybe the best is the third, the 1956 Hungarian uprising (filmed on location in Budapest). The fourth hour, the Bay of Pigs, benefits from location filming as well (with Puerto Rico standing in for Cuba). Plenty of money was spent on this series, and it was put to good use.