THE great spy movie - The Good Shepherd

This is a New Year's treat. A three hour epic, The Good Shepherd is to the cold war spy films as Unforgiven was to the westerns, a complex and multilayered meditation of the history of modern American intelligence, from the 30's to the 60's, as seen through Edward Wilson (played by Matt Damon). The films begins with a couple making love in a seedy room, filmed in grainy black and white. It is 1961, and the U.S. is in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Wilson is a senior CIA official who is in charge of special operations, and is given the assignment of handling the situation. The mission is a disaster, and everyone is looking for explanations. Wilson and his men believe there is a leak, and an investigation begins. From an anonymous source, Wilson is given a grainy black and white photograph of a couple having sex, along with an audio reel of their conversation. If they find out who the people are, they may have their man. Edmund Wilson is a stone faced, unemotional, man in the grey flannel suit character who is good at what he does. The film flashes back to his college years, in the late 30's, at Cambridge, where he studies poetry and is involved in drama. Wilson undergoes initiation at an exclusive club, the Skull and Crossbones, a combination of a fraternity, free masons, and old boys club. This establishes the network that would be around for the next thirty years for Wilson. He is approached by a government agent who wants him to investigate his poetry professor, an Englishman who is reported to be sympathetic to German interests. Wilson undertakes it partly out of patriotism, partly out of realizing that his professor had been deceiving him as a professor -- he plagarizes another poet's work. After successfully exposing his professor and his network, he is asked to join a newly formed intelligence agency. Training has to be done in England -- they have an established intelligence (the best in the world), and it was part of an agreement as the U.S. came to England's aid at the beginning of the war. Before this, Wilson is happily dating a schoolmate, until a fateful night, while out at a Skull and Crossbones retreat, meets a sister of one of the brothers, Margaret Russell (Angelina Jolie). They have a brief but intense one night stand, which results in her pregnancy. Out of duty, he marries her, but it is a loveless marriage. For this reason Wilson accepts the offer to be in the intelligence, and he goes alone to England for training. There he meets his old professor, who in fact turned out to be a British agent. His advice to his former student -- not to trust anyone, that the entire intelligence business is a conviluted world of moles, double agents, and people who lust for power. Over the next twenty years, we witness Wilson's rise through the ranks. It is not clean nor simple, as Wilson learns exactly what it means to not trust. An affair with his German secretary in post war Berlin leads to him finding out she is a double agent; she is executed. A Russian seeking asylum is discovered to be not what he seems, though it took many years to discover this, and at the expense of the man whose identity he stole. His marriage is rocky at best, and his son turns his life into an exercise in seeking his father's approval. He even decides to join the CIA, much to Wilson's dismay. His son becomes involved with a woman in Africa; their relationship becomes a security threat as the photograph is deciphered, and based on that information, Wilson goes to an African city and finds the building and the room. To his shock, he finds a talisman that he had made his son years ago -- Wilson's hobby was making bottled ships. His son turned out to be the leak. Wilson's dealings with his Russian counterpart had favored Wilson up to this point, but he refuses to give in to leverage. He does appeal to his rival, as they both recognize the value of family, but the African woman is killed, on her way to marry Wilson's son. The movie ends with a reorganization of the CIA, a move to a more modern headquarters, and Wilson finally reading his father's suicide note, written forty years prior, and discovering that he had followed his father's path, mistakes and all.

This is heavy stuff. My synopsis still barely covers all the things going on in this film. There are lots of subcontexts - father/son relationships, the role of the men's club and how that networking and mentality developed into government organizations, the symbolism of shoes, and who is filling them, and not the least, the attitudes of WASPs in an evolving and changing world. Matt Damon is excellent in the lead role -- his face is a stone mask, a mystery to his family and the spy world who called him "Mother," for his care taking and lead role as head of Special Operations. Angelina Jolie is great as well, in a very understated role as his long suffering wife, living in fear of her husband. Alec Baldwin, Timothy Hutton, Joe Pesci, and the director Robert De Niro all make significant contributions. De Niro's direction is even handed and the pace steady, essential to such a complicated narrative. One of the best U.S. films of 2006, if not this decade. Remember Smiley's People and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy? Both were classics of the Cold War spy genre, if not the best, but The Good Shepherd beats them both, in narrative, execution, and having the vantage point of being a post Cold War work. A landmark film, and highly recommended!