Long ‘Good Shepherd’ worth sitting through

What would you be like if you grew up as the son of a spy?

“The Good Shepherd” proposes that you’d be a spacey, spooky kid with poor bladder control, that you’d be rushed out of rooms where your father was discussing top secret stuff, and that your nervous mother’s nights would be mostly sleepless.

Oh yes, and you’d be determined to follow a career path just like Dad’s. And that’s despite Dad’s insistence that you really don’t want to get involved in the treachery and double-dealing that comes with the territory.

Quick facts Starring: Matt Damon, Robert De Niro, Angelina Jolie, John Turturro, Patrick Wilson Director: Robert De Niro Run time: 2 hours, 40 minutes MPAA rating: R

Dad is played by Matt Damon, who delivers a fascinating variation on the secretive, tightly wound types he’s played recently in “The Departed” and “The Bourne Identity.” Cast as CIA operative Edward Wilson, he’s there at the beginning of the agency in the 1940s. The movie, which uses a flashback structure, follows him all the way to the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961.

Almost incapable of smiling or suggesting that he’s enjoying himself, even when he’s spending time with his wife (Angelina Jolie) or his deaf mistress (Tammy Blanchard), Edward is an enigma, but he’s never boring. It’s his relationship with his son, played as an adult by Eddie Redmayne, that brings out his most intense sense of loyalty.

Written by Eric Roth (“Forrest Gump”) and directed by Robert De Niro (who previously directed 1993’s “A Bronx Tale”), “The Good Shepherd” runs nearly three hours, and for the most part it justifies that length. While it can be solemn and self-important, it also demonstrates a necessary instinct for gallows humor.

Edward can’t, of course, trust anyone, and that tension helps to give the plot a sense of perspective and just enough momentum. So does his interaction with plenty of others who are caught in a similar trap, including a gay poetry professor (Michael Gambon), the CIA director (William Hurt) and a British agent (Billy Crudup, who complements a sharp British accent with a witty near-parody of post-war British acting styles).

The cast also includes Keir Dullea, Alec Baldwin, Joe Pesci as a Mafia don and, as Edward’s self-destructive father, Timothy Hutton. Most of them dash by, making only the briefest impression, but Hutton and Baldwin do get a chance to make their big moments count.

Suggesting that the CIA has much in common with the Mafia, with its primitive rituals and insistence that even murder “isn’t personal” because, after all, “he knew too much,” “The Good Shepherd” is inevitably a violent story. But De Niro shows admirable restraint as a director.

Even a torture scene involving beatings, LSD treatment, a form of waterboarding and a spectacular suicide, is presented matter-of-factly, without much embellishment. One murder is suggested almost entirely by sound effects; others are underlined by a score by Bruce Fowler and Marcelo Sarvus that recalls Bernard Herrmann’s music for Hitchcock’s classics.

In the words of one character, “The Good Shepherd” is a movie about “too much power in the hands of two few.” Power corrupts absolutely here, but it does take its time completing the process. 

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