"Silence, portent, and stillness..."

Simultaneously too attenuated and too condensed, The Good Shepherd is an anomaly, alright. Robert De Niro's take on the life of career CIA agent Edward White is so lacking in the animated sleaze we expect from spy thrillers that its lugubriousness becomes to seem a virtue in itself. No wonder it flopped. As his scripts for The Insider and Munich proved, Eric Roth's talent for pungent homilies serves him well, especially when one of the grim-visaged actors in De Niro's exemplary cast gets a chance to bare his teeth ("A senator once asked me why we never say 'the' CIA. I said, `Do you ever say `The God'?"). Otherwise the film's determination to present a tabula rasa of a man (this is not a man hollowed by the system so much as the story of a hollow man) without presenting the necessary dramatic foils grows tiresome, even though it's far from dull (this film's problems mirror my reservations with The Lives of Others). And De Niro's perversity here is truly delicious -- why else cast Angelina Jolie as the film's requisite Long-Suffering Wife? Lips never more bulbous and sensually depleted, this is Jolie's most physical performance, and, oddly, one of her best (it occurred to me: I haven't seen her on film since the misbegotten Girl, Interrupted); her brief appearances dovetail with The Good Shepherd's closeted asceticism.

As for Damon, I couldn't shake the impression that he was miscast; whatever Armond White thinks, Damon's mournful Matthew Bourne (the assonance is not unintentional) radiates more brains, more hurt. Is Damon a good actor? Like any handsome lad of Irish descent he fights a futile battle against doughiness: Martin Sheen and Mark Wahlberg in The Departed represent the two poles of Irish aging. In other words, his metier is to subvert his all-American shallowness (the attempts lead critics to mistake him for a "risk-taker" and, yes, a good actor). If I admire more than like him, blame the state of American films, which provide few opportunities for actors with his smarts to flaunt their wickedness (this partly explains why The Departed connected with audiences, and why its actors looked buoyed by the material). Still, the last 25 minutes of The Good Shepherd are almost...Bressonian in their use of silence, portent, and stillness. That Damon projects the qualities that De Niro and Roth enshrine is a testament to a determination Edward White himself might admire.