Robert De Niro (2006)
The Good Shepherd is about a CIA man called Edward Wilson. The film describes his life and career from the late 1930s to the mid-1960s. According to Wikipedia, Wilson (Matt Damon) is one of several characters which are based on or conflations of real people but he’s clearly meant to represent every-CIA-man. The picture moves all over the place geographically as well as chronologically but the tone and tempo never change and two hours and forty minutes is a long time to sit through such an even-paced narrative. Besides, the themes and style are very soon evident (and it doesn’t take long to recognise them as defects too). The espionage details are familiar but Robert De Niro has the actors speak in voices both low (because they’re exchanging secret information) and toneless (because their line of work has eroded their humanity). De Niro seems to think that Eric Roth’s screenplay has depth and complexity – that it’s saying something essential about the corrupted development of the CIA – but it’s just the usual stuff about spying being a spiritually destructive profession. In London during the Blitz, Wilson is urged to ‘get out while you can, while you still believe in what you’re doing, while you still have a soul’. It’s not only obvious that Wilson won’t do that – it also makes no sense because he has looked morally ashamed himself for some time already. The story is increasingly unilluminating: the flashbacks tell us less and less about how Wilson got to be the man he’s become.
At Yale in the late 1930s, Wilson becomes a member of a secret society – the Skull and Bones, a powerful fraternity whose members can expect to ascend within the American political and military establishment. The initiation ceremony involves both physical humiliation and the novitiate’s telling a secret to the assembled members: Wilson describes his father’s suicide, which took place when the boy was six years old. The revelation is very obviously a significant one: as soon as we learn that he didn’t open the envelope containing his father’s suicide note, we know that he will before the film is over. Once Wilson is told by a Skull and Bones brother that his father’s distinguished naval-political career ground to a halt when his ‘loyalty’ was questioned, it’s a safe bet that the son will try at all costs to avoid his father’s fate and that Wilson’s ideas of loyalty will, as a result, be distorted. Also at Yale, as a graduate student (‘in poetry’), he attracts the attention of an English academic, Dr Fredericks (wittily played by Michael Gambon) – who has apparent homosexual inclinations and, Wilson is told, is trying to recruit bright young men to what is a cover for a Nazi support network. Wilson’s actions force Fredericks to resign; when the latter asks why he betrayed him, Wilson reminds him that a poem which Fredericks claimed to have written himself was actually a work published in 1902. (I didn’t understand why he pretended authorship of the poem – ‘Song’ by Trumbull Stickney – in the first place). Working for US intelligence in London during the Second World War, Wilson meets Fredericks again and finds out that he was actually a British intelligence operative at Yale, attempting to infiltrate a Nazi organisation until Wilson’s ‘loyal’ actions wrecked the project. Eventually, and (by the time the moment arrives) predictably, Wilson is forced to choose between loyalty to his country and loyalty to his own son, Edward Jr.
Perhaps I found myself thinking of The Godfather for no better reason than that De Niro is directing but I can’t help making a comparison. In the first two Godfather films, Coppola (who is one of the executive producers of The Good Shepherd) yokes a complicated narrative and character development with extraordinary skill. In The Good Shepherd, De Niro appears to be so impressed by the moral themes of the material that he loses sight of the need to keep the story entertaining. It occurred to me that he saw Edward Wilson and Michael Corleone as kindred spirits – men who decided on a particular form of loyalty with disastrous moral consequences. (Joe Pesci has a cameo here as an aging Mafioso – based on Sam Giancana, according to Wikipedia – and his scene with Wilson comes across like an obscure homage to the great exchanges between Michael Corleone and Hyman Roth in The Godfather part II. The only obvious point of this sequence is to provide Wilson with an opportunity to say, when the Pesci character asks what WASP Americans have to believe in, ‘The United States of America. The rest of you are just visitors’.) In The Godfather the transformation of Al Pacino’s Michael from returning war hero to the head of the Corleone family is an exceptionally gripping and shocking piece of character development. Matt Damon’s Wilson, from the moment we first see him at the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, is very evidently a morally depleted figure. Apart from the first flashback to Yale, when Wilson is in drag as Buttercup in a student production of HMS Pinafore (and rather too accomplished to be fully believable), he’s also a drably impersonal presence throughout.
The Good Shepherd could compare poorly with the Godfather films and still be a fine picture but it’s not. The plotting is conventionally, crudely melodramatic. Wilson and a deaf girl called Laura with whom he’s fallen in love sit on the beach talking about their future together. A Skull and Bones man turns up with the news that his sister is pregnant with Wilson’s child; at the reception following the marriage Wilson is forced to make to Margaret ‘Clover’ Russell, he also receives his marching orders to London for work with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Like other screen spies before them, this lot have strange ideas about what amounts to unobtrusive behaviour. When Wilson and Arch Cummings (supposedly based on Kim Philby) exchange confidential words at a gentleman’s club in London their attitudes couldn’t be more conspicuous if they tried. They go through the same routine, and strike the same poses, in the street a few minutes later – it’s as well it’s late at night and deserted or they would probably be arrested.
There’s a half-hearted rip-off of Blow Up: Wilson and his colleagues look closer and closer at a picture (and listen to a tape-recording where vital words are obliterated by the sound of a siren). We get the message: the more minutely a CIA man examines what he’s doing the less he can see the point of it. (The rip-off is half-hearted because Roth and De Niro do eventually reveal what the image shows and what the siren drowns out.) Once we get into the Cold War 1950s, there’s more plotting – but, because De Niro’s preoccupation with character has by this point been so clear for so long, it seems perfunctory. During this part of the story, a Russian named Valentin Mironov (John Sessions), who purports to be a high-ranking Soviet official, requests and is granted asylum in the US. A while later, another Soviet turns up, claiming the same name and credentials. The torture of the second Valentin Mironov, thanks to its gruesomeness and the strong acting of Mark Ivanir in the role, brings the film to unpleasant life for a few minutes. I can’t see how anyone could do anything but infer from this that this Mironov is the genuine article yet, thirty minutes of screen time later, De Niro and Roth include a long scene in which Mironov mark one is exposed as a fake.
The film isn’t all bad. Robert Richardson’s photography is often striking – particularly in the way that figures in the frame are so sharply defined that their whole bodies seem to be surrounded by an eerie nimbus. And the cast of hundreds includes more than a few very talented people. Damon’s one-note performance here doesn’t make him a bad actor; Gambon and Ivanir do remarkable work. Angelina Jolie gives things a lift on her first appearance and she ages convincingly – it’s a pity that the role of Clover is so poorly conceived. (From the word go, she’s obviously a daring, free spirit; the fact that she eventually becomes an exploited and weak-willed wife is evidence not of surprising depth but of simple, clumsy inconsistency in Eric Roth’s writing.) William Hurt, playing the CIA Director Philip Allen, has a convincing mirthless bonhomie (although he’s also saddled with a typical bit of spy drama ‘characterisation’ that you know is going to be meaningful: he has a passion for Swiss chocolates – a façade for a passion for Swiss bank accounts). As an FBI man, Alec Baldwin’s face suggests many years of soul-destroying experience. In the role of Cummings, Billy Crudup’s efforts to master a cut-glass English accent are amusing (and reasonably successful) and his brightly glamorous look makes a welcome change from the dour faces we see most of the time. (But is this what De Niro wants?)
John Turturro, more restrained than usual, is effective as Wilson’s long-serving sidekick Ray Brocco. Timothy Hutton plays Wilson’s father Thomas and Eddie Redmayne his son. Redmayne’s open features certainly give him the look of relative innocence but he’s too anxious to register a connection with whomever he’s sharing a scene: at first Edward Jr seems unnaturally close to his mother (foreshadowing the role Redmayne played in Savage Grace), then he’s suddenly best mates with his father, then he falls in love with Miriam (Liya Kebede), a beautiful North African girl who’s a Soviet agent. Tammy Blanchard is affecting as Laura but Martina Gedeck, who struck me as an over-deliberate actress in The Lives of Others, confirms that impression in her role as a Soviet operative posing as a friendly interpreter with whom Wilson works in post-war Berlin. (She wears a hearing aid – is Wilson known to have a thing for deaf women? – but he realises during their one-night stand that she can hear perfectly well). De Niro himself makes a brief, masterly appearance as General Bill Sullivan, who recruits Wilson to the OSS – he makes thrilling transitions from professional smilingness to deadly seriousness and back.
The unhappy marriage of Edward and Clover is a clichéd joke but the marriage-that-never-happens between Edward Jr and Miriam takes the prize for the worst bit of The Good Shepherd. Miriam is murdered mid-flight en route to her marriage in America. With everyone waiting outside the church, it appears that she was going to change into her wedding dress in the plane and come straight to the service. The cross-cutting between what’s going on in the air and on the ground is desperate – and the murder itself yields ludicrous images: the girl’s body is thrown from the plane and she descends to earth with her wedding dress following, a detached parachute. The ironies in The Good Shepherd are all staggeringly obvious. Wilson eventually opens his father’s suicide note and reads it in voiceover: we hear what Thomas Wilson was ashamed of, what he set out to achieve – and we realise, as if we hadn’t already guessed, that Edward Wilson is talking about his own life. In the short conversation between Thomas and the six-year-old Edward, the father asks his son, ‘What is trust?’ Edward replies, ‘It’s feeling safe with someone – the way I feel safe with you and mother’. The adult Edward neither feels nor inspires trust in others but, at the end of the day, when Philip Allen resigns from the CIA in disgrace, Wilson rises even higher in the organisation. He is, his superior tells him – and the line drops like a ten-ton weight – ‘Someone we can trust’.
1 January 2010
