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Wonderful historical fiction, a spy flick you don't want to miss

a movie review by Eric Jackson

The Good Shepherd

directed by Robert DeNiro

written by Eric Roth and Philip Kaufman

produced by Francis Ford Coppola et al

With Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie, Robert DeNiro, Alec Baldwin, Billy Crudup, William Hurt, Timothy Hutton, John Turturro, Tammy Blanchard,  Michael Gambon, Joe Pesci, Eddie Redmayne, John Sessions, Mark Ivanir, Oleg Stefan

Universal 2006, now available on DVD

The Good Shepherd is a great spy flick and a thoughtful morality play, which didn’t do so well at the box office in the USA when it was released at the end of last year, amazingly only garnered one Oscar nomination (art direction, which it didn’t win). It took until just now to make it to the big screen here in Panama, and is already available on DVD in the US market.

This is historical fiction, so when someone with a political axe to grind gripes that this or that scene or character wasn’t like it really happened it’s a few notches less stupid than when so many Panamanians who should have known better complained that The Tailor of Panama didn’t portray Panama realistically. Historical fiction is fiction, but loosely based upon history. If it doesn’t have a certain ring of truth, for example if it’s distorted way out of the shape of reality, it becomes not so stupid to complain that it’s obnoxious propaganda. I’ve seen some critiques of this sort, coming from the political right, and I just can’t agree.

Matt Damon plays a bright young student at pre-World War II Yale, who gets recruited into Skull and Bones, then into spying on German symps for the FBI, then as an OSS agent. His spy career carries on into the CIA. He’s involved in some sorts of things that the CIA actually did, and other things that are not historical but not so completely outlandish to be unbelievable.

The strength of this film is that it’s a morality play about trust, betrayal, honor and sacrifice. Damon’s character is quietly loyal to his country and possessed of a well refined sense of honor and some ethical standards about the power he holds, but he gets into a business where everything isn’t necessarily what it seems, in which anyone who is trusted might by treachery or blunder do enormous harm, in which the office politics are deadly ferocious, in which blackmail and subversion are the coin of the realm.

And thus this good shepherd defends his country but wrecks the lives of the people closest to him, does the decent thing by his own lights and that of his social milieu but ends up committing atrocious crimes, becomes a lone wolf who’s impossible to know and dangerous to approach.

But our spy is neither an immoral man nor an amoral man. He’s not a cardboard cutout for ideological target practice. He’s a cipher for the ambiguities of the Cold War or any war, and people who see in black and white with no shades of gray will be uncomfortable with him.

You might just as well see this as the tragedy of a man with all the best intentions turned into a monster by a system, or as a hero who staunchly defended his country in a prolonged and lonely struggle and at great personal cost. If you can perceive subtleties and gradations, your orientation to the left or to the right should neither lead you to love nor hate Damon's character.

Was The Godfather your sort of gangster flick, even though you're definitely not the sort of person who aspires to the alias of Frank Nitti among your peers in Cell Block Number Nine? For many of the same reasons, you would like The Good Shepherd. The great strength of both of these great films is that they were not simplified and exaggerated for kids.

This movie is also a long one. That’s a commercial liability, and for people with short attention spans, an artistic weakness. But when the historical canvas is the CIA from its antecedents in the World War II-era OSS into the height of the Cold War in the mid-60s, and the creative minds behind it have decided that dumbing down shortcuts are to be avoided, the picture will have to be large and the running time a bit long

Take a look at The Good Shepherd if you get the chance.

Books, The Last Voyage of Columbus
Film, The Good Shepherd

Theater, Honk Jr.