"The Good Shepherd"

"The Good Shepherd", as a critic for Newsday pointed out, is something akin to a WASP "Godfather" saga, minus the operatic emotions. That was really how the film played for me. It is certainly not a great, great movie that will remembered and cherished by many with its carefully-lit violence and poetic and oft-fatal familial tragedies. These people in this spy movie are generally buttoned-down and colder Americans.

But, I think I found this film most disturbing than , say, "Godfather II", with its the famous kiss-of-death carried out by Michael Corleone to his older but weaker brother Fredo. (Francis Ford Coppola is the executive producer of "Good Shepherd"; Robert DeNiro directed it. That's a pretty big couple of links to the earlier films in my book.)

Why was it so disturbing? I think because the first wiseguys were mobsters after all, new Americans shunned by the Brahmins of Old Money New York and New England. In movies like "The Valachi Papers" or "Bugsy" or the Coppola epics, they are descendants of Italy and the Jewish Diaspora fighting each other and fighting the Irish cops and the scummy, generally Northern European politicians who only dealt with them to get their share of the take from bootlegging and loansharking and drugs and bordellos and whatever vice turned a dime. That's understandable if not conscionable.

But the WASP "wise guys" in this drama (set in 1939 trough 1961) are the elite of our nation: the wealthy scions of powerful financial and political families, recruited into the shadowy O.S.S. in the wake of gathering storm" of World War II. These are educated and cultured men who grew up in Gramercy Park brownstones and places like Newport and Keenebunkport; nobody treated their immediate families like cattle at Ellis Island. Nor did anyone call their fathers filthy names or swung a billy club in their direction as they walked down the street, pushing a fruit cart in the Bowery or near the Chicago stockyards. What caused some of these men to turn into de facto hoods?

My best guess is the thirst for personal power mixed with patriotism.

These kids--culled from outfits like the Yale Skull and Bones--didn't have to struggle for anything like Charles Dickens' Battle of Life; more like a passing grade in Latin or Calculus at prep school or getting through the degrading and childish rituals they needed to be initiated into Skull and Bones. By the end of the film, if we realize nothing Else, we are reminded how similar human beings are. Michael Corleone just wanted to save his family from destruction; by the end of his "reign" he is destroyong it from within. That's his tragedy.

But what to make of Matt Damon's Edward Wilson? He starts out in heroic mode, giving up Gilbert and Sullivan operettas to represent quasi-Isolationist America in the London of 1940. Five years later, Wilson is there in Berlin to help meet the rise of the Soviet Union out of the ruptures of Hitler's war. Shortly after that comes the National Security Act and the USA is now a no-going-back world power--the world power. We have Britain's language and laws and the resources of Rome at its height.

The trouble is the rest of the world's nation-states just refuse to (or can't ) emulate our society and mirror our paradigm to success, at least not in parts of Latin America, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, etc. Russia is no ecominic threat, but they do have a habit of seeing the world in an equal bi-polar way, and a knack at acquiring client states in sensative places. (Both "Godfather II" and "The Good Shepherd" spend a good deal of time in dealings with Castro and Cuba. It's perhaps in our relations with that island in the Eisenhower-Kennedy years that we really see how uncomfortably close our nation's leaders efforts can come to lay down with criminals and become tarred with their immorality.)

Ergo, secret plans must be hatched and launched , political leaders eliminated, multi-national companies placated at the expense of campesinos and the urban poor, etc. It's winning hearts and minds, folks, those who must be won over even if it is necessary to pull their collective shorthairs painfully along first. The Soviets are ruthless of course so our Agency must be ruthless at times. Perhaps it becomes necessary to exaggerate the enemies' known power in order to continue justifying this nasty work. By the end of the film it's not clear if the people running the CIA are defending the country so much as they are accountants and clerks with guns and poison pens saving their bureaucratic turf.

Edward Wilson and his colleagues at "The Agency" become more like dsiples of Machivelli than Lincoln. Robert DeNiro's character (who plays a character based on the OSS' Wild Billl Donovan remarks toward the end of his life that "my only weakness is the belief that God is just."

Alec Baldwin and William Hurt are in this movie and that brings a lot of weight to the effort. Damon has one scene with Joe Pesci (as a Miami Mafia don) and they have an exchange about what America means to WASP leaders like Wilson that, for me, contains the philosophical heart of the film. It's a great moment in the film and its one of the shortest scenes but doesn't need to be a second longer.

The movie covers a lot of ground. There is even some sex involving a frisky Angelina Jolie and Mr Damon (pictured above) for those of you discouraged by all the ponderous parts of "realistic" spy films.

The first cut of DeNiro's epic reportedly came in at four hours long. It is an enteraining film, but a bit hard to follow in places. The tyranny of the standard running time for a theatrical motion picture is at work here. At a longer length, the film probbaly would have been duller, but better, clearer in character detail. All the actors are fine and I think the lady who plays Wilson's first love, a deaf Yalie coed, will be heard from soon. It's no "Godfather I or II", but its disquieting message about power and its uses and abuses would hold its own with any spy film I can recall.