Theatrical Review of The Good Shepherd

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Weighing in at a bloated 160 minutes, "The Good Shepherd" has all the trappings of Oscar bait: an all star cast, a legendary actor in the director's chair and a subject Oscar likes to reward more often than not. But the run time is the biggest detriment in this story about the formation of the CIA.

The year is 1961 and Edward Wilson (Matt Damon) is one of the minds behind the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. When it goes disastrously wrong, a hunt begins within the government to weed out the traitor. At the same time, the actions and events which led to Wilson's present predicament are recounted, including his time at Yale and what he did during the second world war.

Two hours and forty minutes is an awful long time. Sure, there are longer films out there (most notably "The Lord of the Rings" extended editions) but what separates those experiences from the one you're going to get watching "The Good Shepherd" is this is a character piece as opposed to an action movie. Whereas Viggo Mortenson and company rarely walked anywhere in the first installment of that trilogy, Matt Damon barely gets to jog, let alone do anything kinetic. When a main character is basically inanimate, the audience feels a sense of monotony and, dare I say it, boredom.

The fact of the matter is this material isn't boring, per se the way it is presented makes it boring, not to mention confusing. Damon is a capable actor, as are the people that surround him (Angelina Jolie, Joe Pesci, Alec Baldwin, Billy Crudup, Robert De Niro, William Hurt, Timothy Hutton and John Turturro. They're not the problem. The problem rests with the execution of "The Good Shepherd". With crisscrossing storylines in different time periods and none of the characters particularly sympathetic, this is an overlong, though well produced, History Channel documentary.

Why this story needed to be told non-linearly and expanded nearly to the point of breaking is beyond me. A straightforward story about Wilson and his life starting in his college days and working up to the 1960s would have been more than ideal. Keep all the same elements, just rearrange them so the audience doesn't have to do so much work keeping it all straight. It is mentally exhausting and, considering the running time, entirely too easy to check out of every storyline on the screen. In the end, it doesn't amount to much since each character has squandered the emotional good will of the audience. Damon's Edward Wilson is not exactly the kind of man who is particularly well liked on a personal level. In fact, he can be summed up rather succinctly in a line delivered by fellow agent Ray Brocco: "a serious son of a bitch with no sense of humor".

He is a cheater, a liar, a deceiver, an accessory to murder, strictly formal with his son and dedicated to his job to the detriment of everything else. The character is flawed, but Damon's nearly stoic and even keeled performance is anything but. He has the ability to show enormous emotion and then rein it all back it after a moment. Take, for example, a scene late in the film between him and Angelina Jolie, who plays his wife. They are fighting over their son's decision to apply to the CIA. In what could very well be the only display of powerful emotion in the film, he informs her-yells, really-that he married her for their son. Either the power of the emotion or the words stops them both dead in their tracks, an invisible line having been crossed.

Edward is the emotionless one in this piece Jolie, as Clover, is filled to the brim. She carries the majority of the emotional weight of the film as a wife with no connection to her husband. He doesn't love her and it's open to debate if she truly loves him or simple stays in the marriage for as long as she does because of her duty as a woman in the 1960s. With a character outside the main storyline being the heart of the picture, it's difficult to maintain interest in the mundane CIA story as opposed to the events revolving around the family.

With all the time shifting and story crossing we get in "The Good Shepherd", the main idea-that of a traitor during the Bay of Pigs standoff-gets somewhat lost. It isn't until two hours into the film that we get a firm grasp of who the traitor really is. Obligatorily, the story throws in another such traitor and an accomplice to boot. Around this time, though, all the storylines converge with Wilson's son, also named Edward, and his upcoming marriage. The girl is seen on screen once, never with Edward, Jr., so any viewer can figure out her ultimate fate at least five minutes before it actually happens. Notice I did mention "traitors" a moment ago. Yes, there are two: one is unwilling, the other not so much.

I have serious problems with pulling two bad guys out of the story when, in reality, we've been led to believe there was only one the entire time. The second, whom I will not reveal here, does factor into the story in the earlier timeline. However, based on this character's movements and expressions, I had him pegged for a revelation of another kind. By the time all these evil people come out of the woodwork, I can't imagine anyone really cares. The movie does what it wants without regard to the audience to the detriment of the entire production. Again, there's nothing to latch onto from an emotional standpoint, no single character to empathize with and little in the way of historical fact. This isn't a film "based on a true story" or even "inspired" by one. It's fantasy. Based on that, it can't even be called historical, so what the audience supposedly "learns" here may or may not be true.

"The Good Shepherd", despite being well acted, well produced and poised to be an important film, collapses under it's own bloated running time. A judicious editor could have excised some storylines and tightened up the narrative. Shifting from one time period to another is one of the major offenders here because it allows the audience to forget or lose interest in the main story-the one we start out with, the one the film wants us to care about. All that being said, I'm still giving "The Good Shepherd" a 6 out of 10. Just know what you're getting yourself into.

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