Others say...

"The Bittersweet Spy"
This is a well made film, unfortunately overlooked despite its star ensemble cast and production. Clocking in at 168 minutes, it probably would have made a better mini series. Robert DeNiro does a great job directing this. However the casting of Matt Damon as a man who gives his life up for the CIA was perhaps not the most inspired choice. I agree it's hard to empathise with him, but I saw that as the limitations of Matt Damon's acting abilities. Taciturn and not particularly expressive, Matt Damon also hardly ages much across the decades that this film spans - he's too constant and thus never progresses as a character.

Nonetheless, the movie is engaging - even though it could have benefitted from more tension. As it is, the DVD's deleted scenes reveal entire sequences that would've made the movie even longer. Given the film's multiple subplots, leaving these scenes out didn't hurt. To sum up, The Good Shepherd plays/ reads like a book, and for those confused about the plot...watch it with subtitles. The ensemble cast makes it worthwhile - Angelina Jolie does a great job as does William Hurt, John Turturro, Alec Baldwin, and everyone else.

DeNiro may have been trying to channel his Cold War version of the Godfather here, but this is a slow burn and Damon is no Pacino. Still, a sterling movie and monumental effort from a screen legend.

"Good, but confusing"
I would guess I'm not the only person to have trouble sorting out the twists and turns of a spy film's plot - the layers of betrayal, to be convincing enough to keep even veteran spies plausibly in doubt, have to be very confusing. As such, the morning after, I've got these questions.

1) Is William Hurt's Phil Allen character, apparently based loosely on Allen Dulles, guilty of embezzling money? guilty of taking money from the Soviets? or merely guilty of financial indiscretions which make him susceptible to blackmail? Dulles' financial issues are an interesting footnote to history - that he and his brother as lawyers represented American firms deeply invested in Germany after World War I and remaining so in Nazi Germany but with several layers of financial secrecy through Swiss banks and business fronts - but there has been no suggestions that his loyalty was compromised.

2)Who is Ulysses? Is he a KGB spymaster, or a highly placed KGB spy in the Western spy apparatus?

3)Getting away from plot to character for a moment, Angelina Jolie's character, Wilson's wife Clover/Margaret, rings untrue in one way. She meets him as a wild, beautiful, rich girl. She's seemingly luring him into a sexual liaison because she's expected to find a husband from the right social class and feels pressed to do so with the war threatening to take most eligible men away. I have trouble translating her into the unhappy, drunk, passive wife and mother that lives uncomfortably with him for another 15 years after the war. Far more likely is the suggestion dangled early on when Wilson calls on the phone from occupied Berlin and hears his young son let slip that she's going out with someone, planting the suspicion in his mind that she's being unfaithful, and he retaliates by allowing himself to be drawn into a fling with his translator. The plot uses this to show that this was a onetime thing on her part, and meanwhile Wilson himself allows himself to be compromised when the translator turns out to be a Russian spy. But I would find it more convincing to believe that Clover isn't a girl to suffer the lack of male company for very long, and to have left him for another man by the war's end. I also can't see where the wild girl disappears to. This is unconvincing.

4)I didn't realize until late in the movie that Wilson's Russian counterpart was not, himself, the (fake) defector. I'm not too good with faces. But I thought that was the basis for Wilson's trust in the defector.

5)With the rapid crosscutting between scenes and time periods, and little change in Wilson's appearance to help signal the changes, I was initially confused over the thread - a hair? a violin string? an antenna? - found in the book, was found on his own desk or that of the (fake) defector whom Wilson in the adjoining scenes is confronting in the man's home late one night.

6)I had some trouble separating out the fellow Bonesmen - the guy who talks Wilson into staying in Bones following the humiliating initiation scene and who Wilson follows up the ranks at the CIA, vs. Clover's brother who is killed in World War II, vs. the Senator (her father?), etc.

7)Wilson's ethnic remark to Pesci's character, seemingly meant to be emblematic of WASP bigotry, isn't convincing. Pesci's Joey Prima mobster character is in Wilson's face a bit, busting his balls about his ethnicity. I just see the usually buttoned up Wilson letting loose for a moment to give it right back to him. The scene is still worthwhile dramatically, though, as Wilson gets to witness the close-knit nature of Prima's family, as Prima bickers with his daughter about taking good care of his grandchildren at the beach.

8)At Yale, the word was that it was Scroll and Key, not Skull and Bones, that had the inside track at the State Department and the CIA.

9)Some reviewers see Turturro's character as brutal. Only in one scene is he portrayed as slapping around someone during an interrogation, and the stakes are pretty high when he does. There is no groundwork to suggest that he has a brutal streak in his nature. I find his character's most important function as to highlight the unfair ethnic-class structure at the time. The character is older than Wilson at the outset and also a college graduate, but merely a noncom because he's Catholic and Italian.

There were tons I loved about this movie. Its examination of the conflicting loyalties to country, family, school, secret society and job, and the toll this takes over a lifetime, is formidable. I think its period scenes of 1930s Yale and the Skull and Bones milieu are excellent. I think, however, that the book "The Company" (more than the TV miniseries based on it)does a better job covering the same material with the same themes while rendering it far less confusing.

My questions about this are not a reflection of the film's flaws, rather of my own obtuseness and the film's subtlety. I probably need to watch it again.

"Brilliant Examination of "Fatherhood" and "Loyalty" Against a Backdrop of National Security"
Well, let's get the weaknesses of this film out of the way first. Matt Damon (playing the lead role of Wilson), while likely cast for his ability to bring a silent, brooding, inscrutable intensity to his roles (which this lead role requires), is not really a good fit--too boyish in his looks, not enough gravitas to be playing someone as powerful as a CIA head guy, even one in his early years. I just didn't buy him in this role at initial viewing, though it had nothing to do with his acting abilities. And in fact, once this initial impression is gotten over, one recognizes that Mr. Damon actually delivers a very solid, nuanced performance; and his boyish looks actually become an asset whose strength lies in a sense that his character is, actually, a 'puer aeternis'--a perpetual boy who never learned what it means to be a true man in the sense that fatherhood would require. Next, Angelina Jolie was grossly miscast as the lonely, bitter, betrayed housewife--though Ms. Jolie manages. I believe these casting miscues distracted from the film's forward motion, and so cost the film greatly I think, with much of the viewing public.

But on to the strengths. I must strenously disagree with the Amazon editorial review of Jae Ha Kim, who gets it backward: While elements of casting were weak, the plot/theme was brilliantly played out, with a perfectly paced 2 hours and thirty minutes (roughly). De Niro's decision to use flashback sequences to tell this story required this kind of extended time frame, as they are less direct from a plot-telling standpoint; and the 'flashbacks' device very usefully allowed the audience to focus on how Wilson has arrived at his present position, plot-wise and thematically; the flashbacks also created tension and suspense, as this film is very much a 'whodunit.' The cinematography was also meticulous, complementing the director's attention to plot detail, which added (along with the flashbacks) to an effect of seeing the unfolding of events through Wilson's very meticulous eyes.

And beyond the plot development, we have what makes this film excellent, and highly underrated: The themes of 'loyalty' and 'fatherhood' set against a backdrop of National Security. The 'loyalty' theme involves the question, "which loyalty is most important: To country, to family, to fraternity (i.e., secret society running things), or to self?" The 'fatherhood' theme involves the exploration of Wilson's own failures as a father to his son, which are instigated psychologically by his own father's failure to BE a father to him (Wilson's father takes his own life when Wilson is a boy); it also involves Wilson's becoming, in a sort of twist, a 'father to his country' in becoming one of the founding 'fathers' of the CIA. De Niro (Directing) interweaves these two themes brilliantly. And in this, the film's true plot (from a thematic standpoint) is about Wilson's personal journey from fatherless boy to a man who's own attempts at fatherhood are undermined and betrayed by his psychological inability to be a good father to his son. The terrible irony is that the personal qualities that compromise his own fatherhood abilities are the very ones that make him an effective spy. Pointedly, the film askes, "is this a worthy tradeoff?" And using this thematic query as a launching pad, this film is rightly seen as being a critique of not only the CIA, but of the nature of international "spying" in general. Boys are left fatherless through confused notions of "loyalty" to--what? And are the costs worth it?

Ultimately, this film seems to be arguing that a person's inability to honor himself and his family first, both corrupts and aids, ironically, his attempts to honor so-called 'greater' national and international interests; that America herself, in a way, is left fatherless by those running it, because those running it lack the psychological ability to understand what true "fatherhood" (either of a child or a country) means, by virtue of themselves having been left fatherless by their predecessors' own misgebotten sense of loyalty. At the same time, the film poses the question, "what if, in the world of spying and counterintelligence between nations vying for power and survival, self/family values are not an asset, but rather a liability?"

Thus the film's title, "The Good Shepherd," offers both a sarcastic irony, and a lament. An irony, as we watch these fatherless fathers of the nation fail their own families by giving greater loyalty to secret societies and notions of national "duty," and by compromising their own moral high ground through twisted values of leadership. And a lament, for the world we live in is admittedly dog-eat-dog, and would appear to require a set of twisted values on the part of our leaders to ensure our survival.


"Boring, boring, boring"
I couldn't find anything in this film remotely entertaining about this film. Sure some facts are meticulous, but as far as ever caring about any of these characters-nada. It's just slightly better than Clooney's Syriana. At least I was able to make heads or tails what was going on in this one. I just still didn't care. Pass this one by if you can.

"Yawn... is it over yet?"
This is a very boring movie. Endless dialogue that leads to nowhere. The character development is poor. The plot is confusing and unrealistic. This is painful to watch... 2 hours and 48 minutes of agony on a screen.