The Good Shepherd
Review by Fritz Esker
Robert DeNiro returns to the director’s chair (his last credited effort was 1993’s effective A Bronx Tale) with The Good Shepherd, a sprawling tale of one man’s life in the CIA. Sadly, the film starts out strongly enough, but ends up collapsing under the weight of its nearly three hour running time.
Matt Damon plays Edward Wilson, a Yale man and member of the elite Skull & Bones fraternity, who ends up getting recruited for counterintelligence in World War II. After his successes in World War II, his commanding officer (Robert DeNiro) enlists him for a new intelligence agency that will eventually become the CIA. The film then follows Edward’s journey until shortly after the botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961.
While the film does not cover exactly the same ground, it suffers from being similar enough in its story of the toll being a spy takes on one’s personal life to last year’s classic Munich as to recall memories of that superior film. The biggest problem the film has is that, in trying to be epic, it ends up diluting some potentially very intriguing individual storylines. If it has narrowed its focus to a shorter time span, it could have been more intimate and made us feel the toll the job takes on Matt Damon’s character even more.
The film’s emotional impact is further lessened by the peculiar choices made in the romantic subplot. Early in the film, Damon’s character falls for a sweet-natured deaf girl (Tammy Blanchard). Before he goes overseas, he has a one-night fling with Clover (Angelina Jolie) at a party. Jolie’s character gets pregnant and Damon leaves Blanchard to be responsible and take care of his child. However, Damon’s character and Jolie’s character are obviously never in love, so the strains the job places on their relationship aren’t that affecting. In other words, Damon’s character loses something he never wanted to be a part of in the first place, so it does not have much of an emotional impact. Blanchard is briefly brought back for one scene later in the film, but the film might have carried a bigger emotional punch if the job made Damon grow estranged from a woman he truly did care about.
Despite its flaws, the film has its entertaining passages (the World War II stuff is probably the film’s strongest sustained section). On top of this, DeNiro is able to assemble a truly impressive cast for his film (William Hurt, Michael Gambon, Joe Pesci, John Turturro, Alec Baldwin also appear). However, aside from the flaws listed above, the film’s running time grows burdensome towards the end as the film rambles towards its conclusion. Given the talent involved, a tighter screenplay with a narrower focus might have created something special.