An All-American Sacrifice
The Good Shepherd Directed by Robert De Niro
Every awards season, a superb film gets lost in the shuffle of pseudo-prestigious releases and holiday junk; this year the casualty is The Good Shepherd. Robert De Niros decision to make his second directorial effort a low-key epic about the moral cost behind the founding of the Central Intelligence Agency confounds all the nonsense that awards season fervor suggests is essential to film culture. The Good Shepherd is serious in ways most people have forgotten movies could be.
Matt Damon plays Wasp scion Edward Wilson, a member of Yales Skull and Bones organization whos forced to recognize his social privilege. Wilson becomes part of the creation of the CIA when it develops out of the War Departments Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which had done investigatory intelligence work during World War II. The Good Shepherd goes beyond the facile intrigue of a spy movie; its span over several decades looks inward at Wilsons All-American dilemma. This idealized American white male relates to his social advantages with a now-uncommon sense of responsibility. Wilson sacrifices himselfnot only to an idea of class but also to feelings of patriotic duty. This may be the boldest movie characterization of the year because it defies the snarky, anti-American, self-hatred and nihilism and distrust of Bush-bashers, also known as Borat-mania.
De Niro has taken a dangerous yet faithful chance, betting on the basic, perhaps nascent, ability of American moviegoers to find their most complex quandaries reflected in movie characters. Damon plays Wilson with a poker face, no longer the enigmatic killing machine of the trashy and tedious Bourne Identity movies. (The Good Shepherd is practically a rebuke of the smirking viciousness of that sub-James Bond series.) Its through Damons blond, wasp visage that De Niro hopes to inspire more than a superficial audience identification with an American type. To watch Wilson dutifully conspire in government bureaucracy, traveling the world on secretive missions and keeping his personal life at bay, challenges the conventional sense of how movie characters win our approval. Only Whit Stillmans movies have been as well-informed, deeply felt and politically nonjudgmental about Americas Wasp heritage. The Good Shepherd has been made with full awareness of contemporary, homegrown skepticism about the U.S. government, but it avoids encouraging any easy cynical responses. Empathy for Wilsons humanity is intertwined with feelings for his patriotism. Thats radical filmmaking even David Lynch might envy.
One of the foremost pleasures of The Good Shepherd (photographed with an emotional palette by Robert Richardson) is watching De Niro conduct a narrative that is always a commentary on the way other movie narratives have constructed American experience. This is meta-cinemaas suggested by the ad copy Edward Wilson believed in America. That paraphrase of the opening line of The Godfather takes us through Hollywoods looking glass where morality has been traded for the suspense of the criminal underworld. The Good Shepherd is the most poignant, intellectual epic since Munich (this script is also by Eric Roth)primarily due to the way it shows that belief in a political idea and a social entity tests mans spiritual allegiance. The cast of hard-faced, substantive actors (William Hurt, Billy Crudup, Keir Dulea, Alec Baldwin, Timothy Hutton, Gabriel Macht, Angelina Jolie and De Niro himself in a memorable cameo) is slightly familiar and mysteriouslike figures in a passion play.
Ironically, the mythic figure underlying The Good Shepherd is Michael Corleone, another All-American young man who considered that he was doing what was best for his people. Apparently, De Niro extrapolates his own part in the Godfather epic (as Young Don Vito) the same way he used his roles in mob movies to extrapolate the parochial story of his directorial debut, A Bronx Tale (1993). De Niro ties together his own filmography with admirable integritytransforming the pop excitement audiences take for granted into dramas of unignorable, personal, ethical dilemma. This compares to the liberal sensibility of such Robert Redford films from The Candidate and Three Days of a Condor to Sneakers, Spy Games and The Clearing. But De Niros mix of politics and entertainment is both more populist and confrontational. De Niros artistry matches his integrity.