The Good Shepherd

Palmi (Joe Pesci): 'We Italians, we got our families, and we got the church; The Irish they have the homeland, jews their tradition; even the niggas, they got their music. What about you people, Mr Wilson, what do you have?'

Edward Wilson (Matt Damon): 'The United States of America, and the rest of you are just visiting.'

One of the best American movies I have seen for a long time, Robert De Niro's CIA saga was ho-hummed by the US critics in the Oscar-rush late last year. I hope and expect the reaction over here to be very different. This is a penetrating, serious drama with a lot to say about the Establishment elite who hold on to power in the USA - too bad the American press isn't interested in that (it rates just 55 percent freshness on the Rotten Tomatometer gauge of more than 170 US reviews).

Screenwriter Eric Roth (The Insider; Forrest Gump) has said the project began with an attempted adaptation of Norman Mailer's massive 1300 page novel 'Harlot's Ghost' for director Francis Coppola. Twelve years and numerous false starts later, the movie still bears a marked resemblance to the Godfather films, not least for the dogged manner in which it entangles family and business, the personal and the political, even as Wilson struggles to keep them apart.

The comparison is not entirely to the new film's advantage (it sorely lacks regular eruptions of violence, for one thing), but the idea that men destroy themselves even as they build up empires is ramified by these characters' power and privilege. The Corleone clan could only envy them.

De Niro has directed one film before - 1993's modest A Bronx Tale - but he shows impressive command here, as well as ambition. (He has also been smart enough to get Robert Richardson as his DP, best known for his long collaboration with Oliver Stone). Although this a long film - nearly three hours - it's told at a good clip, with a detached, observant eye, and it navigates through an oblique, complex plot with admirable sure-footedness.

Beginning with the Bay of Pigs fiasco, then going back to Yale and the infamous Skull & Bones secret society, the film draws an absorbing portrait of a conscientiously opaque, intensely private character. (Although they won't talk about it, Bonesmen include George Bush senior, George W Bush and Senator John Kerry, as well as numerous CIA veterans.)

As spy-master Edward Wilson, Matt Damon is closer to a dedicated civil servant than Jason Bourne or James Bond. Wilson wears glasses, reads poetry, and spends most of his time behind a desk. He gives nothing away, listens closely, speaks minimally.

His discretion is an obvious asset for a spy, but it's part of the point of the film that he was born and bred for the position: a WASP from a military family, he's inducted into the Skull & Bones club at Yale in 1939, and is persuaded that his poetry professor (Michael Gambon) is a Fifth Columnist soon afterwards. From there it's but a skip and a jump to OSS training in London during the Blitz; Berlin, where he vies with the Soviets to recruit the brightest Nazi scientists; and eventually the invitation to head up the counter-intelligence unit at the newly minted Central Intelligence Agency.

'You shall know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free' reads the inscription beside the entrance at Langley, a sentiment that raises a rare smile when Wilson sees it. Truth proves almost impossible to divine in a Cold War landscape Wilson's historical counterpart James Jesus Angleton described as 'the wilderness of mirrors'. (After 30 years at the agency, the real Angleton eventually became so paranoid he believed British PM Harold Wilson was a KGB agent, along with German Chancellor Willy Brandt, Canadian PM Pierre Trudeau and Sweden's Olof Palme. He wasn't too sure about Henry Kissinger either.)

As for freedom, Wilson is so protective of the concept he scarcely notices how he's given up his personal liberty, sacrificing happiness and family for his country. He's an honorable man, but it's an open question whether such high principle is also a tragic flaw, even a kind of self-betrayal. Over 25 years, he will turn his back on the love of his life, do what is expected when a more appropriate WASP princess (Angelina Jolie) becomes pregnant, and the harder he tries to do right by his son, the more cruelly he fails him.

This is Matt Damon's most refined and mature performance to date, and though it is by no means as showy, it is assuredly the equal of any of those nominated for the Academy Award this year.

The stalwart supporting cast includes Billy Crudup as a British KGB mole (obviously modeled on Kim Philby, who schooled Angleton in the arts of counter-intelligence), John Turturro, Joe Pesci, John Hurt, Alec Baldwin, Timothy Hutton and De Niro himself as the four-star General who sets up the CIA as an old boys' network for Yalees, but admits to profound misgivings the film obviously shares: counter espionage is at best a necessary evil, and one character suggests that's only half true - that the Cold War was a politically expedient sham.

Angelina Jolie stands out because she's allowed to express the emotions the men have buried inside them, but in a strange way Wilson has closer relationships with two Soviet spies, a defector, Mironov (John Sessions, acquitting himself very ably), and his KGB opposite number, Siyanko, codename Ulysses (the excellent Oleg Stefan). It's the patient delineation of sympathetic adversaries and untrustworthy friends that makes this such a thoroughly engrossing and finally poignant picture.

Tom Charity
tom.charity@lovefilm.com