THE GOOD SHEPHERD (FILM)

'''The Good Shepherd''' is an Academy Award-nominated 2006 film directed by Robert De Niro (his second directorial effort after ''A Bronx Tale'') and starring Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie, with an extensive supporting cast. The film was rated "R" for "some violence, sexuality and language" by the MPAA. Although it is a fictional film loosely based on real events, it is advertised as telling the untold story of the birth of counter-intelligence in the Central Intelligence Agency. It is a Morgan Creek Productions film distributed by Universal Pictures. The film's main character, Edward Wilson (played by Damon), is loosely based in part on James Jesus Angleton and Richard M. Bissell, Jr.. William Hurt's character, Phillip Allen is based on Allen Dulles, and General Bill Sullivan, played by Robert DeNiro, is loosely based on Major General William Joseph Donovan.

Contents

Plot

Cast

Production

Critical reception

Factual and production errors

References

External links

Plot

In 1961, the Bay of Pigs Invasion fails due to an informer or leak of some kind. Afterwards, a photograph and recording on reel to reel tape are dropped off anonymously at the home of Edward Wilson (Matt Damon), CIA operative.
The narrative flashes back to 1939: Edward is attending Yale University and is a new member of Skull and Bones, a secret society that aims to create bonds among future leaders of the United States. As part of his initiation, Edward must reveal a secret: he says that as a young boy, he discovered his father's (Timothy Hutton) dead body and a suicide note. Edward hid and kept the note, but has never read it. Wilson is recruited by an FBI agent (Alec Baldwin), who claims that Edward's poetry professor Dr. Fredericks (Michael Gambon) is a Nazi spy and asks Wilson to find out who his associates are. Wilson complies, and Fredericks is fired.
At a Skull & Bones retreat on Deer Island in 1940, General Bill Sullivan (Robert DeNiro) asks Edward to join the Office of Strategic Services and offers him a post in London. Edward also sleeps with Margaret 'Clover' Russel Wilson (Angelina Jolie), his friend's sister. Edward learns that Clover is pregnant, and although he is in love with a deaf girl named Laura (Tammy Blanchard), he feels compelled to marry Clover. One week after the wedding, he is sent to England. To his surprise, Fredericks is also in London: he is actually a member of British Intelligence, and while at Yale had sought to infiltrate a Nazi organization. Edward's betrayal of his professor had ruined two years of espionage work. Despite this, Fredericks recognized Edward's gifts and recommended him to be trained in counterespionage in London.
British intelligence officer Arch Cummings (Billy Crudup) tells Edward that Fredericks' indiscriminate homosexual relationships pose a security risk, and asks Edward to deal with his former mentor. Fredericks refuses Edward's advice and tells him to "quit the dirty work" while he "still has a soul." However, he understands if Edward wants to "tie his shoe" - apparently code for "clean up the problem." Shortly afterward, Fredericks is killed.
The timeline moves to post-war Berlin, where the Allies and the Soviets, in a race for technological superiority, are each trying to gather as many German (Nazi) scientists as possible. Edward encounters his Soviet counterpart, codenamed "Ulysses," who praises him as a formidable adversary. Edward interviews potential German informants with the aid of a female interpreter, who wears a hearing aid. When Edward goes home with the interpreter, he realizes that her hearing aid is actually a spying device, and that she is a Soviet operative who has infiltrated OSS activities. Edward has the woman killed, and lets Ulysses know that he did it.
Edward returns home after six years and meets his wife and son, Edward Jr., giving him a model ship inside a glass watch casing. Sullivan approaches Edward again to ask for his help forming a foreign intelligence association (the CIA) where Edward will work with his former colleague Richard Hayes (Lee Pace) under Phillip Allen (William Hurt). Edward accepts, hiding the details of his job from his wife's friends and other acquaintances.
Edward is told to interview Valentin, a Russian requesting asylum and claiming to be a high-ranking official who knows Ulysses. Edward encounters his old sweetheart Laura at the theater; they go back to her house and sleep together. At a Skull and Bones retreat, Margaret anonymously receives photos of Laura and Edward during their romantic encounter. She interrupts the dinner, throwing the pictures at Edward. Edward breaks up with Laura by sending his assistant to return a cross he'd kept of hers when they were college sweethearts.
Edward gets a call from a Soviet defector (Mark Ivanir) stating that he is the real Valentin Mironov and the person who they know as Valentin is a fake: his real name is Yuri Modin, a KGB operative working for Ulysses. Edward does not believe him, and his men torture the Russian to find out his true identity. They give him liquid LSD which causes him to behave erratically: he shouts that he is Valentin Mironov and commits suicide by jumping through a glass window. This refers to an actual event where a US Army scientist (Frank Olson) died in a similar way, allegedly as a result of unwitting participation in CIA-conducted LSD experiments called MKULTRA.
Edward visits Edward, Jr., at Yale, where he has also been tapped by Skull and Bones and approached by the CIA. Edward and Margaret try to talk him out of joining, but Edward Jr. signs up anyway, to become closer to his distant father. This causes a further rift between Edward and Margaret; Margaret eventually moves to Arizona. At another Skull and Bones party, Edward discusses the upcoming Bay of Pigs invasion with Hayes. Edward, Jr., overhears the discussion, and Edward tells him that he cannot repeat what he overheard to anyone.
Time passes and the Bay of Pigs invasion fails. The CIA thoroughly analyzes the photograph (which depicts a Caucasian man and African woman making love) and the tape (which has been edited) that had been dropped off anonymously at Edward's house early in the movie. From clues such as the brand of the ceiling fan, the window curtains, and the sounds on the tape, they deduce that the photograph might have been taken in Leopoldville, Congo. Edward goes to the Congo, finds the room, and realizes that the photograph and tape are of his son Edward, Jr.--the ship in a glass watch casing sits on the nightstand of the room, though it was blurred in the photo. Ulysses has apparently been awaiting Edward's arrival. He plays an unedited recording, which reveals that Edward, Jr. repeated the classified Bay of Pigs information to his lover. Ulysses reveals that that the woman is a Soviet spy who has truly fallen in love with Edward, Jr. Ulysses encourages Edward to protect his son by spying for the Soviets in return. Edward is noncommittal; he confronts his son, who says that he is in love with the woman and plans to marry her. Edward tells him she is a spy, but he won't believe it.
Edward exposes Valentin as a Soviet spy after finding evidence in the binding of the book ''Ulysses'': a passport and recording device. This also exposes Arch Cummings as a co-conspirator, since in an earlier scene, Cummings gave the book to Valentin as a seemingly benign, clever gift playing on Valentin's knowledge of Ulysses, the Soviet spy. Arch has now fled to the USSR. After this, Edward declines to run counter-intelligence for the Soviets. Ulysses notes of Edward's son's fiancée: "neither of us can be sure about her", and asks whether "you want her to be part of your family". Edward does not respond.
Edward, Jr.'s fiancée boards a small plane, and in mid-flight, she is thrown out of the plane. When she doesn't show up at the wedding ceremony, Edward must inform his son of his fiancée's death, and his reactions in this scene and the preceding scene in which he and Margaret toast his son's happiness, suggest that he knew it was going to occur. Edward, Jr. turns to his father and tearfully asks if he had anything to do with the death. Edward says no. Edward Jr. reveals that his fiancée was pregnant; the news shocks and saddens Edward.
As the film closes it is left open whether Edward will at a future date, when called on to betray his country to save his son, choose country over family. The conversation with Ulysses regarding the Congolese spy clearly references a future 'favor,' implying something unrelated to the situation with Edward Jr. Ulysses has checkmated Edward, as unless he betrays his son himself, Ulysses will always have the leverage.
Upon returning home, Edward finally reads his father Thomas's suicide note. His father's words reveal that he had betrayed his country. He had left words of love for his wife and son Edward, particularly imploring his son to be a good man and live a life of decency and truth.
The film ends with Allen's resignation as CIA director under a cloud of financial improprieties, and Edward entering his new office, a special wing built at CIA headquarters where he will be the first head of counter-intelligence, working for his fellow Skull and Bones classmate, Hayes, who will be the new CIA director.

Cast

Actor	Role
Robert De Niro	Bill Sullivan
Matt Damon	Edward Wilson
Angelina Jolie	Margaret 'Clover' Russel Wilson
Alec Baldwin	Sam Murach
Billy Crudup	Arch Cummings
Tammy Blanchard	Laura
Keir Dullea	Senator John Russell, Sr.
Michael Gambon	Dr. Fredericks
Martina Gedeck	Hanna Schiller
Gabriel Macht	John Russell, Jr.
Joe Pesci	Joseph Palmi
Eddie Redmayne	Edward Wilson, Jr.
John Sessions	Valentin Mironov #1/Yuri Modin
Oleg Stefan	Ulysses/Stas Siyanko
John Turturro	Ray Brocco
Liya Kebede	Miriam

Production

Eric Roth^[1] penned the screenplay in 1994 for Francis Ford Coppola and Columbia Pictures. Coppola left the project because, he said, he could not relate to the characters finding them "unemotional" (although he retained a credit as co-executive producer). Wayne Wang was set to direct but management changes at Columbia ended Wang’s involvement and Philip Kaufman was the next person set to direct but he eventually left the project. When it moved to MGM, John Frankenheimer signed on to make the movie and wanted Robert De Niro to star. Unfortunately, Frankenheimer died in 2002 and at the same time De Niro was developing his own spy story. According to producer Jane Rosenthal, this has been Robert De Niro's pet project for nine years, but it proved difficult to produce in a pre-9/11 world and had to compete with his busy schedule as an actor. The actor said in an interview, “I had always been interested in the Cold War. I was raised in the Cold War. All of the intelligence stuff was interesting to me.”^[2]
De Niro wanted to do a film about the CIA from the Bay of Pigs to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Roth’s script ended just after the Bay of Pigs. They ended up making a deal: Roth would write up De Niro’s idea into a screenplay if the actor would direct his existing script. If ''The Good Shepherd'' proved to be a commercial success then their follow-up would be De Niro’s pitch. The project subsequently moved to Universal Pictures where producer Graham King agreed help finance the $110+ million budget. He had a deal with Leonardo DiCaprio who was interested in playing the film’s protagonist Edward Wilson. De Niro planned to shoot the movie in the fall of 2004 but DiCaprio couldn’t do it then because he was making ''The Departed'' for Martin Scorsese. King left with him and so did his financial backing. King told ''Daily Variety'', "If the marketplace got better, I'd love to make this movie. It's one of the best scripts I've ever read (but) you can't make the movie for any less than we have it budgeted for. I certainly wouldn't disrespect Bob (De Niro) by getting him to cut the budget of the film." On November 20, 2004, ''Variety'' magazine reported that Matt Damon agreed to star as Wilson and James Robinson’s Morgan Creek Productions agreed to help finance the film with a budget under $90 million which meant that many of the principal actors, Damon included, would have to waive their usual salaries to keep costs down. Principal photography began on August 18, 2005 with shooting taking place in New York City, Washington D.C., London and the Dominican Republic.
De Niro wasn’t interested in making a spy movie with flashy violence and exciting car chases. “I just like it when things happen for a reason. So I want to downplay the violence, depict it in a muted way. In those days, it was a gentleman’s game.” He and Roth were also interested in showing how absolute power corrupted the leaders of the CIA. Early on, De Niro said in an interview, “they tried to do what they thought was right. And then, as they went on, they became overconfident and started doing things that are not always in our best interests.” In order to achieve authenticity, he hired ex-CIA operative Milt Bearden (who worked for the agency for 30 years) as the film’s technical advisor.
The music for the film was by Bruce Fowler and Marcelo Zarvos. They replaced James Horner, who left the project due to creative differences.^[3]
Edward Wilson, the character played by Matt Damon, is based at least in part on James Jesus Angleton, the long-serving director of the CIA's counter-intelligence staff who also fell victim to intense paranoia during his career, and covert operations specialist Richard Bissell. Bill Sullivan, the character played by Robert De Niro, is based on William Stephenson and William Joseph Donovan. William Hurt's character Phillip Allen is likely based on former CIA Director Allen Dulles, while Lee Pace's character Richard Hayes shares some similarities, including a similar name, to Dulles' eventual successor Richard Helms, and the character Arch Cummings bears some similarities to Kim Philby. The character Yuri Modin shares similar characteristic to Soviet defector Anatoliy Golitsyn, and the character of Dr. Ibanez bears some similarities to Jacobo Arbenz.
Oscar-winning actor Joe Pesci appears in one scene as a Mafia boss ("Joseph Palmi") who, it is implied in the film, is a fictionalized composite of Santo Trafficante Jr. & Sam Giancana (in one scene it is mentioned that Castro has seized "three of [Palmi's] casinos and thrown him out of Cuba." In fact, Castro did nationalize several casinos owned by both Chicago and Florida organized crime interests). The CIA recruited such mafiosi for multiple assassination attempts against Fidel Castro. The story thread, however, is not fully developed in the film.

Critical reception

The film received mixed reviews with the review tallying website rottentomatoes.com reporting that 89 out of the 160 reviews they tallied were positive for a score of 56% and a certification of "rotten" (according to the website's criteria).^[4]
''Time'' magazine ^[5] said Matt Damon "is terrific in the role — all-knowing, never overtly expressing a feeling. Indeed, so is everyone else in this intricate, understated but ultimately devastating account of how secrets, when they are left to fester, can become an illness, dangerous to those who keep them, more so to nations that base their policies on them." David Ansen in his ''Newsweek'' ^[6] wrote, "For the film's mesmerizing first 50 minutes I thought De Niro might pull off the ''The Godfather'' of spy movies... Still, even if the movie's vast reach exceeds its grasp, it's a spellbinding history lesson."
Lisa Schwarzbaum of ''Entertainment Weekly'' praises DeNiro's direction and Damon's performance, noting the latter's maturation as an actor. She gives the movie a grade of "B"^[7].
However, Elizabeth Weitzman of the ''New York Daily News'' wrote, "If the lives of CIA spies are really this dreary, they may as well keep their secrets to themselves," and Peter Travers of ''Rolling Stone'' magazine opined, "It's tough to slog through a movie that has no pulse."
Public reaction was more positive, with members of the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com), giving the movie^[8] an average score of 7.0 out of 10 from 19,635 ratings.

Factual and production errors

★ In the scene where Edward is initiated into Skull and Bones he is looking at a picture of former members. The picture he is looking at is actually from 1947, eight years past the date of the scene.

★ In the postwar Berlin scene that shows Russian soldiers raising the Soviet flag, the troops are shown carrying SKS rifles. This soon after the war the SKS would not have been in wide issue to ground troops (although all are shown carrying this particular rifle).

★ A prominently featured Finnish passport and driver's license include some questionable linguistic choices.^[9]

★ The scenes in wartime London show the characters walking outside at night under working streetlights, but London's streetlights were not turned on during wartime, in order to make it more difficult for German bombers to locate their targets.

★ In the scene where Edward reveals Valentin to be a spy working for the Russians, there is a copy of ''Churchill, Taken From the Diaries of Lord Moran: The Struggle for Survival'' on the shelf alongside Joyce's ''Ulysses.'' While the scene is set in 1961, Lord Moran's book, which covers the life of Winston Churchill from 1940 to 1965, was not published by Houghton Mifflin until 1966.

★ When the Valentin Mironov #1/Yuri Modin character first contacts Wilson's office in 1953 (film insert), one of the agents claims "man is senior officer KGB...", but the KGB was founded in March 1954 (former MVD, MGB, GPU).

References

1. Roth co-wrote ''Forrest Gump'' and ''Munich''; see Internet Movie Database entry on Eric Roth [3] retrieved 20 APR 2007
2. Intelligence Design John Horn
3. Marcelo Zarvos and Bruce Fowler replace James Horner on ''The Good Shepherd''
4. ''Rotten Tomatoes'' Reviews Accessed January 14, 2006
5. ''Time'' review Accessed January 14, 2006
6. ''Newsweek'' review Accessed January 14, 2006
7. ''The Good Shepherd'' review in ''Entertainment Weekly'' [4]
8. ''The Good Shepherd'' IMDB page [5],
9. as reported in Ilta-Sanomat

External links

★ ''The Good Shepherd'' official site

★ ''The Good Shepherd'' theatrical trailer at Apple.com.

★ ''The Good Shepherd'' at the Internet Movie Database.

★ ''The Good Shepherd'' Reviews at Metacritic

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