The Good Shepherd

(167 mins, 15) Directed by Robert De Niro; starring Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie, Alec Baldwin, Billy Crudup, William Hurt

  1. The Good Shepherd
  2. Production year: 2006
  3. Country: USA
  4. Cert (UK): 15
  5. Runtime: 167 mins
  6. Directors: Robert De Niro
  7. Cast: Angelina Jolie, Billy Crudup, Joe Pesci, Matt Damon, Robert De Niro
  8. More on this film

Thirty years ago, Robert De Niro played the pivotal role of the young Vito Corleone, Italian immigrant founder of the crime family in Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather II. They've got together again, as producer (Coppola) and director (De Niro making his second credited feature film) in The Good Shepherd to examine the roots and progress of another influential secret organisation from a very different area of American life that also wields clandestine power and believes itself to be acting for the public good.

Scripted by Eric Roth, whose credits include Michael Mann's The Insider and Steven Spielberg's Munich, the film is a serious, subtle, well-researched and occasionally ponderous fictional study of the creation of America's first integrated intelligence organisation, the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) on the eve of the country's entry into the Second World War and of its successor, the infinitely more powerful CIA, at the beginning of the Cold War in 1947.

The central character is Edward Wilson (a convincingly grey and serious Matt Damon), a literary scholar from a distinguished WASP family, who becomes a member of the world's most exclusive secret society, Skull and Bones, while a student at Yale. Based in part on the famed superspook and counterintelligence expert James Jesus Angleton (though much saner), Wilson is recruited for the newly formed OSS by Roosevelt's intelligence adviser, Bill Sullivan (a lightly disguised version of Major General 'Wild Bill' Donovan, played by De Niro).

Sullivan explains that the organisation is to be run by members of the WASP establishment. No Jews, blacks or Catholics, except for himself, though a few people from the lower orders might be engaged to do the dirty work - torturing suspects or killing troublesome folk. Indeed, we see such tasks carried out by an Italian-American sergeant (John Turturro) assigned to be Wilson's assistant in London.

The film unfolds in flashback from the time of the CIA-engineered Bay of Pigs disaster in 1961, and we see Wilson, involved in one form of ruling-class secrecy and confident supremacy at college, moving easily into another in the service of his country during the Second World War. Deception and deceit become forms of truth in the espionage business, and suspicion eventually develops into paranoia as the war against the Nazis is replaced by the Cold War and the CIA's tentacles reach everywhere. Among his tutors in field craft are two Englishmen from MI5, Dr Fredericks (Michael Gambon), an indiscreet old queen posing as a literary professor, and the suave, Cambridge-educated Arch Cummings (Billy Crudup), a stand-in for Kim Philby.

At the OSS office in postwar Germany, and then at the CIA in Washington, his boss and chief sponsor is the avuncular Philip Allen (William Hurt), Skull and Bones 1914, and clearly modelled on pipe-smoking Allen Dulles. In 1945 Berlin, he meets 'Ulysses', his KGB opposite number, who is to play a game of cat and mouse with him or, more correctly, cat and mole.

This is a consistently intelligent and engrossing movie about the creation of a self-perpetuating international espionage community, living in a twilight world that gratifies a childish need for fulfilling fantasies, sharing secrets, exercising ruthless power in the belief that you are disinterestedly working for the good of the nation. Wilson is drawn in as a result of covering up his father's secret and his son, who's seen his mother (Angelina Jolie) kept out of the loop, becomes a CIA agent after his admittance to Skull and Bones. It is a quasi-religious calling, hence the film's title.

It seems very knowledgeable about the private language of this old-boy network ('the rocking chair is still smiling' appears to mean that President Kennedy is pleased with what the spooks are up to) and how the agency regards itself. There's a key moment when a Mafia boss (Joe Pesci), being lured into a plot against Castro, talks about what blacks, Italians, Jews and Irishmen have that gives them a consoling cultural identity. 'But what have you got?' he asks this quiet, complacent WASP. 'The United States of America,' Wilson replies. 'The rest of you are just visiting.'

The Good Shepherd is better than any of the feature film versions of John le Carre's novels and nearly as good as the TV mini-series based on Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley's People. John Wayne had a long-cherished project: to star in a biopic about Bill Donovan. It would have been a very different film from this one.

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