The Good Shepherd: What did you think?
highhopes
Posts: 1,358MI6 Agent
I saw "The Good Shepherd" today (along with another viewing of CR). The reviews were a little mixed, and the film does move sloooow, but it pays off in the end. I enjoyed it. Portrayals of real-world espionnage is always a bracing tonic for the fanciful James Bond variety. It's a dirty, dirty business, but I suppose that for us, the public, war in the shadows is better than war on the battlefield.
I really like Matt Damon as an actor. And he handles the role of what is basically an office-bound government "clerk" as one character calls intelligence officers, and a rather colorless and humorless one at that, very well. A lot of actors I think would have chafed and insisted they get to chew up the scenery at least once. Michael Gambon, Alec Baldwin, Angelina Jolie, William Hurt, Billy Crudup (a credible British accent for an American male actor -- a rarity, IMO) and Robert DeNiro are good as well, in somewhat flashier roles.
I'm wondering what others thought of it?
I really like Matt Damon as an actor. And he handles the role of what is basically an office-bound government "clerk" as one character calls intelligence officers, and a rather colorless and humorless one at that, very well. A lot of actors I think would have chafed and insisted they get to chew up the scenery at least once. Michael Gambon, Alec Baldwin, Angelina Jolie, William Hurt, Billy Crudup (a credible British accent for an American male actor -- a rarity, IMO) and Robert DeNiro are good as well, in somewhat flashier roles.
I'm wondering what others thought of it?
Comments
it seems to be a good movie, but i haven't seen it yet (blame local cinemas)... i rather see him in The Departed or in Team America (i love his quotes over there)
By the way, is this your Seventh CR screening? i love it as much as you do (i'm lying, perhaps the half of it, but you really enjoy it) but i will save for the DVD. i someone is willin to take me in the cinema again to see it, i'll gladly go.
actually, it's my sixth viewing of CR
It's about 2 hours, 40 minutes, I think. It isn't so much the length per se, but the subject matter. And I'm probably giving the wrong impression by saying that it's slow -- as in boring. It's just that it's about as far removed from a Bond film as it gets. There's no action: everything is done in whispers, in the shadows. But it does have an emotional punch. The more I think about the film, the more I appreciate it.
I mentioned in another post that the film is loosely based on the career of James Jesus Angleton, CIA's longtime chief of counterintelligence, and a man whose obsessive belief (a false one) that a Soviet mole had penetrated the agency is said to have caused more damage to the agency than anything the Soviets ever did.
The movie doesn't really focus specifically on that aspect of the character or the story, but rather on what makes a man like Angleton, who began life as the editor of a poetry magazine. Just as CR tells the story of how Bond became Bond, "The Good Shepherd" is a kind of "Angleton Begins."
Roger Moore 1927-2017
The movie was only loosely based on Angleton, in the sense that he did have an interest in poetry (he was a friends of Ezra Pound and others); was very, very paranoid; counted Philby as a friend and championed a "defector" who, it seems anyway, was in fact a KGB plant.
I actually liked the fact that Damon and Jolie weren't layered with obviously phony pancake make up. I guess because of my age I'm familiar with the stuff referenced in the film, so I wasn't lost at all, really. Most of the events were presented in a historical context, also. I chalk the lack of obvious aging to suspension of disbelief.
As for the movie, yes, it is slow moving. But I think the critics are being a little silly about that fact. There is a good deal of dramatic action, though not a lot of Bond-style shooting and mayhem. It simply presents espionnage stripped of its romance. It's a very dirty, but necessary, I think, business. What Damon tells Pesci in that one scene, I think, is very true about spies keeping wars "small." I much preferred having the CIA-SIS-KGB fighting a Cold War than the very hot one we might have had.
But to get back to the pacing of the movie, to me, the complaint that The Good Shepherd moves slow is like complaining that a Western happens outdoors. We've seen too many spy action flicks to realize that espionnage is not really like that. I thought the movie was terrific and very emotionally involving.
You must go back and edit your initial post, you'll see the box to check.
Thanks Alex.
I would only add that I found Damon's line to Pesci about WASPs basically owning the country and everyone else being a visitor to be a real stunner in its brutal meaning. I was shocked that Michael Mann used it in his montage at the Oscars, because to me it's very ugly.
I wouldn't call it a "great" film either, if only because Damon is so cold in it. A lot of people have noted the similarites in structure to The Godfather(it used to be a Coppola project), but The Good Shepherd suffers from not having a cast of colorful, warm, emotive characters. But I think that was necessary, given the subject matter.
Another area that I thought should have been played up more is the dedication of these people. It's kind of a cliche to suggest that these people are just overgrown frat boys playing a cynical "game" of chess. In truth, whether one agrees with them or not, what has struck me in my readings about the early CIA and espionage agencies in general, is the almost messiantic sense of mission. Missing that is a little like Coppola portraying the Cosa Nostra as simple thugs. There's a dimension missing.
Well put HH. I think TGS is overly simplistic in its portrayal of the CIA and the other intelligence sevices. It seems to suggest that doing that kind of job is somehow akin to selling your soul. That you're going to lose part of yourself and damage the people around you. I know the film is about a man who does just that, who literally becomes a shadow, but there does seem to be an implication that it's cause and effect. That the job is responsible and this is what will happen to any person doing it. I don't quite believe that. There are a lot of people doing those jobs who seem to be able to function as people away from their work. I think that the Damon character might have retreated into his own world regardless of what job he did. If he had maintained his interest in poetry and lived the academic life I think he would have become lost in books and poems. I also don't think the film made enough of his background. That here's a man who loves poetry, but winds up doing a job that is completely different. It's there in the film, but it's not really used. I thought DeNiro could have done a lot more with this aspect of the story.
It is ironic that a character based on Angleton is shown to have damaged his family more than the agency, when in real life, it was the other way around: Angleton's family relations seemed normal enough, but his paranoia caused far more damage to the CIA than the KGB ever did, according to many people. He was the kind of guy who would hear someone tell a casual story at a party and would immediately try to check out the tale to see if there were any discrepancies with the facts: who was there, the dates, what happened, etc ... That's how weird he was (much as Damon checks the poem -- there's wasn't any suggestion that he recognized it, since it was pretty obscure, so I took that to mean he checked it on a whim). A lot of CIA people had their careers destroyed as a result of Angleton's belief that a mole had penetrated the agency, which he based on information from a defector no one else really believed. Which I guess was partly the result of his experience with Philby, a former friend. I sort of think that would have made a more interesting film, rather than the kind of mustach-twirling "spooks" so many of the people in TGS were portrayed as. Still, I did enjoy the movie. I did appreciate Damon's performance, although it was kind of a thankless job.
I loved not just that line, but the whole scene. It was, as you said, absolutely stunning in its brutal meaning. I disagree however about the selection of it in the Oscars montage. I think it was appropiate as the point of the montage was to highlight not just the beauty in American film, but also the ugliness. I have to say, though, when I heard the line at the Oscars, I was quite shocked, as I couldn't imagine an Oscar montage featuring the N word.
I guess that particular line didn't paticularly get to me. Damon's point is that elites run the world -- Gee, really? Not exactly Deep Thought here. Hey Matt, Bobby: tell me something I don't know. Pesci mobster must have been pretty dumb to even ask the question he asked. That the world is fixed against guys like him is an article of faith for wiseguys. That how they rationlize their lives. Wasn't that the Godfather's whole reason for being? To be the bigshot who pulled the strings? I'm more disappointed in The Good Shepherd than I was when I first saw it, although I still like it an awful lot. I think it's theme was a little pedestrian.
Now the thought expressed by Damon that spies keep wars "small," that's interesting. That even in peace time, the world, in a sense, is at war. It says something about human beings.
Well this show would have been fascinating if they had spent the right amount of time on it. But The Company just breezes through plot developments and history without so much waving as it passes them by. You have elements in here that would make terrific one-hour episodes. The American of Russian descent who trains with the KGB, Kim Philby; all of this should have been allowed to develop so that we could invest something in the characters. But everything happens so fast.
I remember seeing the promos for it on TV, but I guess I missed it. Sometimes a story is just too big -- and complicated -- to be done justice to by the visual arts, and the Cold War has to be one of them.
I liked The Good Shepherd, although I am more ambivalent about it now than I was when I first saw it. It didn't really aim to be a comprehensive history of the CIA or the Cold War, but more of a study of what living a lifetime of secrets does to a personality. I'm not sure it entirely succeeded the way that, say, The Godfather, a film it has been compared to in scope, did in showing how the rot of organized crime can infect otherwise decent people like Michael.