The Good Shepherd

The Good Shepherd, starring Matt Damon and featuring Jon Turturro, Angelina Jolie, Alec Baldwin, William Hurt, Lee Pace, and Robert DeNiro, is not at all the film that I was expecting. Advertised as a film about the birth of the CIA, I was expecting it to be pretty typical.

It was not.

This devastating film opens with archival footage of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the failed op that really catapulted the Agency into the public eye. Be warned: director DeNiro expects that you didn't just go to watch Damon and Jolie make out; in other words, that you actually know something about one of the most famous events of the last hundred years, because he's not going to explain it to you. At a CIA shack on a beach within range of the Bay, we meet Edward Wilson (Damon), as he begins his long journey to learn why it all went wrong. But the film isn't particularly interested in what happened at the Bay of Pigs - it's interested in Wilson, and the story of the birth of the CIA is told in the story of the man who, tragically, became its heart and soul. The character is based on James Jesus Angleton, who founded the Agency's counterintelligence division, but the film's title isn't really related to his middle name. More on that later.

Through flashbacks, always returning to Wilson and his men working to identify the agent in a photo and on a recording who blew the Bay of Pigs, we learn about his father's suicide, his time at Yale, his subsequent initiation into Skull and Bones, and from there the story fully takes on the conviction that this society has spawned basically every influential politician, businessman, and soldier in the United States. This is where Edward makes the connections that topple him into the as yet undeveloped and unnamed world of counterintelligence, and the rest of the film - and his life - is consumed by his journey through this strange, terrifying new land. The more knowledge Edward acquires, the more mocking the CIA's use of John 8:32 as its motto becomes. This world is not one in which the truth sets him free, but instead binds and weighs on him ever more firmly as he learns just how much is at stake - and how few people have the knowledge and means to protect the rest.

That being said, the film is about as far from melodramatic as a story can get. Penned by Eric Roth (Munich), it is profound, tragic, and slightly minimalist. It doesn't waste its running time. Seeing Damon get dolled up as a woman and sing Gilbert and Sullivan is funny, sure, but it has the underlying importance of suggesting that there was a time when Edward did have a measure of happiness and freedom. As the film progresses, the significance of its title - a name Jesus called himself when he said that "the good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep" - becomes clear. Edward has had thrust upon himself, while also taking it willingly, the responsibility to protect America. And he does, though not physically, lose his life in the process.

Like Munich, there is far more to the story that I can tell you. Suffice it to say that it is in every way excellent, and well worth your time. DeNiro has propelled himself to the upper echelons of the actor-turned-director field - think Ben Affleck's Gone Baby Gone or Clint Eastwood, that kind of caliber.

Like the twice-mentioned Munich, or No Country for Old Men, it is a film that is the opposite of entertainment, and yet I would like to watch it again, because it was so very, very good.