The Good Shepherd

"I was asked why we don't put 'the' in front of CIA. I told him we don't put 'the' in front of God." De Niro's first outing in the director's seat since his 1993 debut A Bronx Tale is an in-depth look at the birth of the CIA as seen through the eyes of one of its first agents, Edward Wilson (Damon). Wilson, recruited by the OSS - a counter-intelligence unit - during WWII, is approached by General Bill Sullivan (De Niro) to help build an organisation to be the "eyes and ears, not the heart and soul" of the United States. Wilson throws himself into his work, but Cold War paranoia takes over and, distrusting all around him, his job has dire consequences for his marriage (to Jolie), his family and his sanity. The Good Shepherd is a nuts-and-bolts, behind-the-scenes peek at a spy genre - the flipside to The Bourne Identity, the paperwork behind a James Bond mission, a cloak-and-dagger film without the dagger. Tracing the CIA's actions from the end of WWII to the Bay of Pigs fallout, it's hard to tell if the movie is too long or too slow. Oliver Stone gave JFK, an equally long film that probably looked like a snore-fest on paper, such pace and zest and the time just flew by. Not so with The Good Shepherd. It's a detailed study into the CIA's first steps and if you're looking for a political-based thriller that ticks along nicely like No Way Out you'll be bored beyond belief before the halfway mark - it's not that kind of film. However, if you're in for taking a long look into the machinations of the CIA, how it came to be and the black ops it was involved in, then look no further. De Niro makes Damon the embodiment of the CIA: showing his inauguration into the Skull And Bones society, a fraternity that spits out senators, politicians (and future CIA agents), De Niro draw parallels between these clandestine boys clubs and the CIA, suggesting that they are nothing but childish rituals and secret handshakes. As Joe Pesci, who appears briefly here along with Alec Baldwin, William Hurt and Michael Gambon, pointed out in the aforementioned JFK, the CIA's operations were just "fun and games" - shame no one told screenwriter Eric Roth, who contrives a rather joyless albeit intriguing epic. The jury is still out on Damon's Wilson: either Damon plays the detached, emotionless agent to perfection or simply just isn't interested in the film. If the former is true, it's a clinical, cold and reserved performance from Damon, but that doesn't stop his character dropping the biggest clanger in the film - his makeup. Sounds silly to point out something as trivial as makeup, but Damon doesn't age in the thirty years spanning the movie and we're left to assume that this must have been a decision by De Niro not to mature him in order to suggest that the CIA never grows old. It's just another theory, though.