The Good Shepherd (2006)

Star Review

Over a decade on from his terrific A Bronx Tale, De Niro returns to the director's chair with a film that attempts to tell a secret history of America. Much underrated upon its initial release – above all by critics perhaps expecting something comparable to Casino Royale or The Bourne Supremacy – The Good Shepherd charts the development of the CIA through the interlinked personal and professional lives of one of its operatives, Matt Damon's Edward Wilson, the sort of stickler for detail the Agency must routinely pursue.
De Niro mainly treats international espionage as compelling desk work, although one just-batty-enough-to-be-true set-piece shows the CIA deploying locusts to ruin a South American politician, and a truly hideous scene towards the end suggests how the innocent are often the first casualties of the spy game. It remains a classy, slow-burn, intriguingly murky drama, full of men in raincoats stepping out of the shadows to utter dialogue that sounds like code to be cracked – "We have a stranger in the house" – even when it isn't.

Mike McCahill on 21st May 2007

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Film Description

Robert De Niro makes an ambitious return to the director's chair in this an epic, fictionalised account of how the Central Intelligence Agency was born. Matt Damon plays Edward Wilson, a reserved young Yale graduate whose membership in the exclusive Skull and Bones society leads him away from poetry and into a relationship with the federal government. The story alternates between Wilson's gradual emergence as a genuine government operative in the early 1940s and the infamous Bay of Pigs conflict in the early 1960s. Along the way, he has a sweet romance with a pretty deaf girl (a sparkling Tammy Blanchard) and ends up marrying the woman he makes pregnant (Angelina Jolie) out of a strong sense of duty. Throughout the film, the emergence of a mysterious tape haunts Wilson, who is determined to uncover the truth behind a leak in his secret organisation.

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DVD Extras

• 15 minutes of deleted scenes

Film Details

Cast

Robert De Niro, William Hurt, Michael Gambon, Alec Baldwin, Joe Pesci, Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie

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