Matt Damon struggles to bring any interest to a rather feeble fake history of the CIA, The Good Shepherd |
The Good Shepherd is very, very, very roughly based
on history. Wilson is a clear substitute for the CIA’s first head of counter-intelligence
James Jesus Angleton. Hurt and Pace play versions of the first two directors, Allen
Dulles and Richard Helms (as you can tell from their barely disguised character
names). Billy Crudup’s suave Archie is a clear Kim Philby substitute. All these
characters are thrown into a long, ramshackle plot with little drive or energy
that can’t decide if it wants to be a spy thriller or a genuine history of the
CIA.
In the end it settles for being something in the middle,
which is a way of saying neither of them. The central mystery is “who betrayed
the CIA operation at the Bay of Pigs”. Well for starters, the failure of the Bay
of Pigs needed no shady leaker to fall apart, since it was a terrible idea, disastrously
executed. The film spends a great deal of time filling in a back story to illuminate
this mystery, but fails so completely to communicate the stakes (other than whether
Wilson will survive some internal office politics) that it could (and perhaps
should) have been dropped from the film.
The main problem is the complete lack of thrust, pace or truly
relatable characters. It’s clearly been put together by fans of the works of Le
Carré
who think just saying words like “tradecraft”, “mole” and “scalphunters” will
make it indistinguishable from the master. What it doesn’t carry across is any
of Le Carré’s
politics, humanity or fire. For instance, Le Carré would have ripped through the posturing
amateurishness of the nascent CIA – which recruits almost exclusively
over-grown school-boys from secret Ivy League societies – and the arrogant incompetence
of many of its early agents.
The Good Shepherd avoids this entirely, instead seeing these
secret societies as training grounds for covert thinking rather than ludicrous elite
clubs that restrict the talent pool to a small elite with little world
experience outside of their country clubs and bizarre clubbish rules. The CIA
is generally not criticised at all – either for incompetence or imperial
over-reach – and its failures have to be chalked up to spies and traitors rather
than mistakes or poor calls (of which it made many). Swallowing everything whole,
it renders the film toothless and eventually uninteresting.
The Good Shepherd bites off an absurd amount of ‘a few
degrees left of history’ events. What this generally means, is events race by
with an astonishing speed without really making any connection with the viewer.
Characters are defined more by who plays them rather than who they are. Some colourful
actors in sprightly cameos like Baldwin, Gambon and Pesci just about give their
roles depth and interest in scenes where they are co-leads. But others who have
vague, limited characters arcs across the film – such as William Hurt, left
with nothing to play with at all, or John Turturro wasted as a bruiser number
two for Wilson – fail to make any impression. Although you can forgive it a lot
for giving John Sessions of all people the best role he perhaps ever had as a
violin-playing defector.
At its heart is Matt Damon who gives a performance of unknowability and cold, ruthless dedication to the agency with such perfectly judged distance and blankness that you never once really give a damn about him. His marriage is of course a disaster – the only real big deviation from Angleton’s own personal history – with Angelina Jolie struggling with a nonsensical role that switches from ambitious sex-pot to mousy, frustrated housewife with barely a second to explain why.
De Niro’s direction is assured, professional and precise but fails
to ever bring this story to life or really communicate any reason for telling
it, other than an armchair enthusiasm for espionage stories. Because it’s never
about anything – neither the morals of spying, the cost of cold wars, the glory
of serving your country or a fascinating duel between two master-spies (there
are elements of all of these to be fair, but all just thrown in there rather
than explored in any depth) – we are never given a reason to really be
interested. So much of its history is total bunk (almost nothing happens the
way it actually happened and virtually every character is an invented amalgam) you
don’t even come away having learned anything.
The film eventually focuses in on resolving its central
non-too-engaging central mystery, with a series of reveal that can probably guessed
a fair way off (even if one of the characters wasn’t an obvious Philby
substitute). It does boast a surprisingly brutal plane flight, but otherwise ends
with the same puff of nothingness that most of the film amounts to. There are
secrets and mysteries here – but no depth, wisdom or interest to give them
weight.
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