Good Shepherd, The

Movie Info

Genre(s): Drama  |  Romance  |  Suspense/Thriller

Written by: Eric Roth

Directed by: Robert De Niro

Release Date:
Theatrical: December 22, 2006
DVD: April 3, 2007

Running Time: 160 minutes, Color

Origin: USA

Summary

RATING: R for some violence, sexuality and language

Starring Matt Damon, Robert De Niro, Angelina Jolie, Joe Pesci, John Turturro, Alec Baldwin, William Hurt, Billy Crudup, and Timothy Hutton

The tumultuous early history of the Central Intelligence Agency is viewed through the prism of one man's life in this espionage drama. (Universal Pictures)

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What The Critics Said

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What Our Users Said

Vote Now!The average user rating for this movie is 6.6 (out of 10) based on 123 User Votes

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Klunko J gave it a4:
The Good Shepherd certainly isn’t all bad. A lot of things ultimately attributable to director Robert DeNiro are positives: The pacing ably conveys the plodding tedium of working for a government bureaucracy, combined with the sporadic tension of crises, both professional and personal, while the muted audio serves as a relatively subtle counterpoint to the repetitive (and thereby somewhat more heavy-handed) inclusion of deaf or hard-of-hearing characters, adding up to a sense of being excluded from critical information – which must be a permanent condition for those really playing the intelligence game. The photography, the set scouting, the prop selection – everything that resulted in this movie’s visual look and feel – are all outstanding in concept and execution. The problem with The Good Shepherd – and unfortunately, it’s a killer – is that this film purports to be a fictionalized version of the origins and early Cold War history of the Central Intelligence Agency. The subject is inherently political. Everyone has his or her politics, and that’s fine. It’s not fine when fact is mangled in the service of one political agenda or another. I strongly suspect that with The Good Shepherd, “fictionalization” has been cited as an excuse for trashing facts that conflicted with someone’s political agenda, and inserting new pseudo-facts that are a lot more manageable. Shepherd screenwriter Eric Roth reportedly enjoyed, and based the film in part on, Norman Mailer’s novel, Harlot’s Ghost. It shows. Roth would’ve been better served simply adapting Mailer’s work for film, because, while Mailer’s work takes liberties with historical fact, it isn’t nearly so self-indulgent, or so inclined to the political hard sell, as Shepherd ended up being. From the beginning, The Good Shepherd oversells the well-trodden notion that the CIA was dominated in its early days by Ivy Leaguers, particularly Yalies from the secretive Skull and Bones society. While this notion is factually and historically accurate, Roth dismisses anything that detracts from it. One particularly salient counter-example to the Ivy Leaguers’ sway in the CIA was Bill Harvey. Harvey was one of the most outstanding officers of the early CIA. He was bigger than life: fat, foul-mouthed, alcoholic, reckless with guns, racist, religiously bigoted, and sexist (oddly enough, except with his wife, whom he by all accounts loved). Harvey was a state university graduate from Indiana – almost the antithesis of the Ivy Leaguers offered up in Roth’s script (except for the fact that he was neither black, nor Jewish, nor Catholic). Harvey was also an ex-FBI agent, drummed out of the Bureau by J. Edgar Hoover, who went to work for the upstart new CIA at least partly to spite his old boss. Harvey went on to run CIA’s Berlin Station famously well during a critical period of the early Cold War. Despite his many flaws – or perhaps, because of a perfect, interlocking balance of several of them – Harvey was largely responsible for an operation that still stands today as one of CIA’s major successes: The Berlin Tunnel. With this operation, Harvey and his people managed to tunnel from Berlin’s western sector into the Soviet-occupied eastern sector, stocking the tunnel with electronic eavesdropping equipment that ultimately collected thousands of hours of what the Soviets thought were secret Red Army communications. Harvey’s control of the operation kept security maintained despite the multitude of problems, chief of which was probably where and how to dispose of all the dirt moved during the tunneling phase without the Soviets figuring it all out. Bill Harvey was also one of the only Americans to suspect the British traitor Harold Adrian Russell “Kim” Philby – represented almost kindly in The Good Shepherd as “Archie Cummings” – early on. Why doesn’t The Good Shepherd include at least some reference to a key figure such as Harvey? Well, it’s a long, sometimes-plodding movie as it is. I can’t imagine the studio wanting it longer. But I suspect the omission of Harvey also has something to do both with maintaining Roth’s conception of the CIA as an exclusive bastion of Skull and Bones, and with the peddling of a Left political agenda. Someone as obnoxiously Right – and successful – as Harvey is simply inconvenient in that regard. There are other examples of inconvenient facts being mangled or omitted in The Good Shepherd. William Hurt’s character, Philip Allen – almost undoubtedly meant as a representation of CIA Director Allen Dulles – states at one point that there will be “no Jews” in the ground-floor CIA. This statement is demonstrably false – and surprising, given Roth’s reported attention to Harlot’s Ghost, which features one Jew and one New Englander of half-Jewish descent, both CIA officers, among its four major characters. Again, this appears to be an example of Roth trying too hard to push his notion of Skull an Bones exclusivity, malevolently manifest in a CIA that was at least naughty, if not outright evil, from the beginning. Sometimes Roth’s molestation of historical fact runs to politically-driven anachronism. The Good Shepherd superficially treats the cases of Soviet defectors Anatoliy Golitsyn and Yuriy Nosenko. In the real world, Soviet intelligence officer Anatoliy Golitsyn defected to the CIA, and, rather intriguingly, put about the notion that the Soviets would deliberately dispatch other, false defectors, with the purpose of discrediting the ostensibly genuine information Golitsyn was providing. Sure enough, Nosenko came along a few years later, another Soviet defector, who definitely did try to discredit Golitsyn. A very “hall of mirrors” scenario – which one to believe? One problem with The Good Shepherd’s treatment of this plotline is that it could comprise a film all on its own. It’s too complicated to be dealt with effectively as subplot. Another problem is that the CIA’s documented harsh interrogation of Nosenko is commingled with the CIA’s research and development into LSD. It’s known that the CIA was hoping to use LSD as a sort of “truth serum”, or possibly as a means of “programming” otherwise-unwitting and/or –unwilling operatives. However, there was no documented use of LSD on Nosenko, who ultimately survived the CIA’s harsh interrogation and went on to live out his life in freedom, somewhere in northern Virginia. The second defector in The Good Shepherd, on the other hand, falls to an LSD-provoked death – but only after spouting a bunch of nonsense about the Soviet Union being a pseudo-superpower, rotting from the inside out, which the United States (chiefly the CIA) has conflated into a goliath in order to sustain its military-industrial complex. If such a line had come from a Soviet defector circa 1979, it might be believable. But in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Soviets were leading us in the space race. They were checkmating us in the Third World. They were beginning to bleed us in places like Vietnam, and their Arab clients had every chance of annihilating the State of Israel. There was no reason for any Soviet, even a defector, to peddle such a line of patent tripe. The inclusion of waterboarding in the regimen of harsh measures to which the second Soviet defector is exposed in The Good Shepherd is but a more blatant example of the same kind of politically-motivated anachronism, excused by the increasingly flimsy cover that this film is a “fictionalization”. Finally, the actors. Based on all of the above, one might expect a ringing condemnation of generally Left performers like Matt Damon and Alec Baldwin, but I think they actually turned in great efforts. Matt Damon, in particular, conveyed perfectly the sense that allowing oneself emotion is an indulgence, one that’s not affordable within the context of a high-stakes global conflict spanning decades. Alec Baldwin, of course, is immensely talented, with an apparently limitless range, whatever his politics. And anyway, it wasn’t Matt Damon or Alec Baldwin who wrote this thing. Angelina Jolie, however, is simply annoying in The Good Shepherd, as is generally the case with most aspects of her public image. It’s a tribute to the acting skills of Matt Damon, and the directorial skills of Robert DeNiro, that a movie built on such a rickety foundation of non-fact can still be as watchable and as entertaining as The Good Shepherd is. However, given DeNiro’s reported interest in intelligence, and his stated plans to crank out sequels to Shepherd, I would hope that next time out, he taps someone else for the script.

Timoteusz D gave it a10:
I didn't think much of it the first time I saw it. Slow, dull, too subdued, and the protagonist was quite un-dynamic. Then I watched it again, alone, and I was bowled over by the brilliance and craftsmanship of this movie. The fellow who apparently wanted a spy thriller with beautiful women and lots of action is faulting this movie for being different from what he wanted. He should realize that this is a different genre of film from e.g. James Bond. This movie concerns the formation of a U.S. bureaucrat in the spy business, from college to middle age. The performances are all unbelievably perfect. Damon is subdued to the point of monotony, but on the second viewing you realize that that is the point. The U.S. spy industry is not full of derring-do but bureaucrats who have to put their work in front of their family and their souls. That is the point of the movie: the trade-offs that Damon must make. It is beautiful, sad, poignant, and in fact a perfect film. Highly recommended for a contemplative viewer who likes details and careful puzzling over clues, words, and gestures, as in a serious Soderbergh film.

Kaitlin gave it a10:
To say this movie is for old people is just excusing the fact that you simply did not have the patience or intellect to want to understand it. The younger generation would rather be entertained than challenged. Being 20 years old and someone who found this movie fascinating, I would recommend this movie to anyone interested in working for the government, like myself. Everyone in this movie acted how men and women acted in this day. Superb movie.

Punguin Yoga gave it an8:
This is a movie for adults. I don't think it's supposed to be a burlesque, as most movies about spy craft are. Espionage is probably dull and unglamorous for the most part. Surely some of the other reviewers don't think James Bond is real, do they? A man like that should be killed by his own people in five minutes for drawing attention to himself! Anyway, I enjoyed this and I just bought a new copy for only $6 at the local Kroger's. What a pleasure to see an understated movie about anything.

Ted K. gave it an8:
A very good movie if you're in the right mood for it (cerebral, patient). Hard to follow, but that's part of the charm (and it's not a mess like Syriana). The bulk of it will be comprehensible in one viewing, but it took a second time for me to catch some of the stuff.

Donna B. gave it a9:
Every viewing reveals new revelations of understanding. What prevented the press from ranking this polished, gripping film at least three stars? Why the paltry two?

J. S. gave it a0:
To a teenager, this would be (and it is) an extremely boring movie. The movie focuses on one thing: a man and his boring life as a CIA operative. Although, it is intended for older audiences, but it doesn't please the action-movie goers who look for spy shootouts, automatic pick-ups of beautiful women, and, of course, a diabolical villain. Not a good choice to buy or rent. I made this mistake.

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