The Good Shepherd Movie Review

I’ll take advantage of the privileges James has given me to note how good the film “The Good Shepherd” is.

While I’ve never been a spook, I know more than a little about the CIA. My father-in-law, a cousin of Allen Dulles, went from OSS to the CIA at its beginning. I’ve a brother and sister-in-law who worked there (both now retired), as well as numerous friends and acquaintances dating back to the late 1950s, including a number of those ‘ghosted’ in the film.

Based on my knowledge, Robert De Niro’s film does a truly great job of combining different threads of different stories about the CIA into a compelling story. It’s not a biography of anyone in particular, nor is it a Roman Ã la clef, which leaves to the the viewer the attempt to identify who might be being portrayed by what actor. Rather, it takes different aspects of different peoples’ lives and combines them into original characters. It takes very real events and crises–both political and personal–and puts them in a believable yet fictive setting.

The main character, for instance, Edward Bell Wilson (played exceptionally well by Matt Damon), is shown as a very WASPy sort of guy: Ivy League (Skull & Bones, even!), married to the daughter of a senator. The OSS and early CIA were certainly Ivy League-ish, though not exclusively, and very white and patrician. The members certainly subscribed to a WASPish code of conduct. Private troubles remained private; self-medication through alcohol was common and far preferable to having a notation on one’s record of a visit to a psychiatrist. The wifes of officers were kept largely in the dark about what their husbands were doing, not just about particular operations, but also about for whom they worked. Here again, alcohol (and illicit sex and prescription drugs) tended to be the balms to soothe all pains.

The Wilson character has some characteristics of James Angleton, primarily professional. Angleton did become obsessed with the idea of a Soviet mole high up within the US intelligence services. Angleton did feel personal betrayal when it was learned that Kim Philby–with whom he had worked in London during WWII–was a Soviet mole. Likewise, the film offers a view of dealing with a mole within the British embassy in Washington and the notorious Golitsyn and Nosenko affair. But the Wilson character does not display Angleton’s peculiar walking gait nor the way in which he characteristically moved his hands. The film has Wilson’s wife (wonderfully underplayed by Angelina Jolie) named ‘Clover’. That was actually the name of Allen Dulles’ wife.

The film blends several different storylines together. For instance, in dealing with the Golitsyn/Nosenko matter, the film introduces the entirely separate line of CIA misuse of LSD (including Projects MK-Ultra and Midnight Climax). LSD was not, in fact, used operationally as a ‘truth serum’ on suspected Soviet agents; it never got past the experimental stages in which the Agency tried to evaluate its usefulness.

“The Good Shepherd” does an amazingly good job of capturing period detail, whether in clothing and interior design or in social attitudes. It also captures a period in time during which the CIA and FBI actually worked cooperatively, a state that crumbled when the FBI’s Hoover learned to distrust Angleton so much that he forbade the sharing of information. That state continued at least up until 9/11, if not ’til today. The only flaw I noted was the way in which the women walked: there’s something more assertive in the way today’s women walk that was simply not done in the 1950s and 60s.
The film, all three hours of it, is extremely well done. Characters are believable; the situations, for the most part, are historically plausible. Unlike re-creations of history such as Oliver Stone’s “JFK” or “Nixon”, though, De Niro does not seem to have a political ax to grind. Instead, in capturing a real feel of the Cold War, he settles for telling a complex story of dedication to the job at the expense of all else.

This is a film you should most certainly see.

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The Good Shepherd Movie Review

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