The Good Shepherd is a great history lesson, but a tedious film.
Every once in a while, a film is released that is masterfully crafted and beautifully filmed, but boring as hell. "The Good Shepherd" is one such film. I liked it and I felt it was highly informative, but it felt more like an extended history lesson than it did a product designed to entertain me. Director Robert De Niro is a capable director and he is a stickler for details. Eric Roth´s story about the creation of the CIA during the Cold War is a true-to-life look at the beginnings of the agency through the eyes of one of its principal architects. De Niro pays close attention to details and strives to bring them to life. The film´s CIA advisor has stated it is incredibly accurate and detailed. With a running time of 2 hours and 48 minutes, this high level of detail and historically accurate is a burden and when Matt Damon portrays one of the most wooden characters that I can ever remember seeing in a film, "The Good Shepherd" becomes a task of survival and endurance. It is a well done film, but it is just so hard to sit through in one sitting.
Matt Damon is Edward Wilson, a highly intelligent son of a formal Naval Officer that committed suicide. Wilson is inducted into the secretive Skull and Bones society and soon eventually recruited to serve the United States military with clandestine intelligence operations in the European Theater during World War II. Although he is in love with a deaf girl, Laura (Tammy Blanchard), a night of bliss with the aggressive and sexy Clover (Angelina Jolie) impregnates Clover and forces Wilson into a marriage borne out of the need to do the "right thing" and not necessarily out of love. Edward is by nature a cold and uncaring person, perhaps due to the final moments he shared with his father the night of the suicide. His marriage to Clover is anything but a loving relationship and as much as Damon´s character bores us to death onscreen, the marriage shared between him and his wife, who eventually answers to Margaret, is pure emotional torture with a complete lack of love and partnership.
Multiple timelines are intertwined in the film, and Edward´s involvement in the War is just one of the plotlines. The film actually begins with the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and Edward and his senior CIA officer, Philip Allen (William Hurt) must answer for the failure, as they were among the very few who knew of the invasion´s landing point. As the story progresses, it is learned that Edward´s son Edward Junior (Eddie Redmayne) had overheard plans and may be a responsible party for the information leak. Philip Allen has secrets of his own and Edward Wilson must uncover the leak and possibly use evidence against Allen to cover his own hide and not be the member of the CIA that takes the fall for the failure. As this storyline moves parallel to the events from 1931 until the Bay of Pigs, the marriage between Margaret and Edward becomes increasingly distant and held together only by Edward´s love for his son. Edward is fully dedicated to the CIA and shows as little emotion in his personal life as he does when he must deal with Russian spies.
A lot of ground and a lot of information is covered in the nearly three hours of movie contained within "The Good Shepherd." The "Whodunit" aspect of the film slowly evolves and until the CIA finally begins to break down the evidence and video tape showing the leak, it is unclear as to why may be the leak. Edward, himself, may very well be the leak and Matt Damon offers up an almost guilty demeanor during the earlier parts of the film. As the dirty elements of the tape become more visually clear, Edward and his agents unravel the mystery and Edward is sent out into the field to search for additional clues and to amass information that may be beneficial in clearing up the Bay of Pigs mishap and prevent him from losing his position at the fledgling CIA. This investigation and the intermixing of the foundations of the CIA is enough material to create two films and with so much information being thrown at the audience and so many characters, "The Good Shepherd" almost requires additional viewings or study time to completely grasp everything that goes on.
This burdening story is further slowed by Matt Damon´s performance. Damon isn´t a wooden puppet, but Edward Wilson was so driven and so non emotional, that he is a boring person and a dreadfully painful personality to spend time with. Jolie´s involvement in the film is limited as well, and although it is easy to sympathize with her character, Margaret is hardly an entertaining or passionate person. Aside from Robert De Niro´s portrayal of a physically unhealthy General and Joe Pesci´s portrayal of an angry Italian man, almost everybody in this film is downright boring. Alec Baldwin is an FBI hat that is cut from a cookie cutter. Tammy Blanchard is very good as the loving and tossed-aside Laura, who suffers from hearing loss. Billy Crudup, John Turturro, Timothy Hutton and Michael Gambon all deliver technically competent performances, but are ridden with uninteresting characters.
"The Good Shepherd" is a good movie. It is just a boring history lesson of a production. War and Peace is a good book. It is long and boring too. The same can be said for the Bible. Not every work of art is exciting and entertaining, but there is value and beauty in such works. "The Good Shepherd" is a technically masterful production with an incredible cast. There is just so many details and storylines thrown at the audience and the uninspired and dull and unemotional characters make the three hour film seem more like a six hour miniseries on PBS. If you are looking to be educated on spies and the beginnings of the CIA, then you certainly won´t be disappointed by "The Good Shepherd." It is a very serious film. I liked it and saw the value of the production, I was just not entertained by it. For those reading along, there will be a pop quiz on this history lesson.
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