The Good Shepherd
Matt Damon has played a morally compromised goody-goody so many times that he’s developed a shorthand for it. It’s up to directors to push this smart, appealing but unexciting actor in new directions. That’s what Martin Scorsese did in “The Departed,” where Damon found humor in macho panic while also summoning a chilling, bone-deep emptiness. It was a performance that recalled Robert De Niro’s best work, but in “The Good Shepherd,” with De Niro behind the camera and Damon in front of it, there’s no similar alchemy. Damon is simply pursed, guarded and dull. His expression hardly changes in this intelligent but enervating two-and-a-half-hour spy saga that makes the same point half-a-dozen times and then, in case you’re unconvinced, makes it again: Working in espionage will cost you your soul. “The Good Shepherd” imagines the CIA as the creation of old-money Northeastern WASPs, many of them members of the Skull and Bones society at Yale. De Niro and screenwriter Eric Roth do a workmanlike job drawing you into this exclusive milieu. They show how secrecy and betrayal are both the currency and the undoing of the men within it. But De Niro’s scope is neither vast nor intimate enough. He observes action and emotion at the same brooding remove, and he leaves his actors hanging. None suffers more than Angelina Jolie, in the underwritten and incoherent role of Damon’s wife. “The Good Shepherd” could have been a knockout with a dynamic director like Michael Mann in charge. Call De Niro the bad shepherd.
LISTEN: The Good Shepherd
[...] I watched THE GOOD SHEPHERD last night (7:00 at Regal La Habra), and I enjoyed it. I thought there were pretty good performances all around, including an all-star bench led by John Turturro, (fellow blogger) Alec Baldwin, Bobby De Niro, and Joe Pesci. By the end of the three-hour flick, I desperately wished that my Dad was cool enough to be in the CIA. THE GOOD SHEPHERD follows CIA agent Edward Wilson from his New England childhood through his Skull & Bones years at Yale to the CIA. Over the course of the flick, we watch Wilson’s paranoia grow and his home life disintegrate. Despite the Book of Job-style torture that I had to watch him endure, I still wanted to trade places with him and help bring down Cold War Commies. David Ansen of NEWSWEEK writes, “For the film’s mesmerizing first 50 minutes I thought De Niro might pull off the ‘Godfather‘ of spy movies.” [...]
OgMog: beta » The Good Shepherd: Good Enough
2 Jan 07 at 7:01 pm