The Good Shepherd (15)

Robert De Niro, directing for only the second time, has attempted to do for the CIA what his old friends Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola did for the Mafia. The Good Shepherd is a long world-historical drama, covering 22 years of American counterintelligence from the start of the Second World War to the calamitous failure of the Bay of Pigs in 1961. As an actor who made his name characterising the rotten core of American lowlife, De Niro might not seem an obvious choice to investigate Ivy League blue-bloods who inherited power. Yet closer inspection reveals surprising consonances between the two groups: both operate as a highly secretive state within a state, both stress the value of loyalty, and both punish betrayal with ruthlessness.

Based on a script by Eric Roth (Munich, Ali, The Insider), the film chronicles the rise of the CIA in much the same way as Norman Mailer did in his gargantuan novel Harlot's Ghost. It centres upon the career of one man, beginning with his recruitment by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during the Second World War, then proceeds to chart his involvement in the Cold War, as America and the Soviet Union try to outwit one another.

Edward Wilson (Matt Damon) is a methodical, fastidious straight arrow whose unexceptional front conceals a mastery of the dark arts and dirty tricks of espionage. We first meet him in Washington, in 1961, as the American mission to unseat Castro in Cuba goes terribly wrong. "There's a stranger in our house", he is told, and gradually the evidence of a leak accumulates. A photograph, and an audiotape of a couple making love, will come to have repercussions not just for his office but for his private life.

The irony here is that, by the 1960s, Wilson's private life is his office. His career as a snoop starts at college in the late Thirties when he shops his pro-Nazi English tutor (Michael Gambon); then he's invited by General Bill Sullivan (played by De Niro) to join the OSS, whose recruitment policy ("no Jews, no negros, not many Catholics") upholds the celebrated tradition of American democracy. No sooner has Wilson got married to a well-connected woman (Angelina Jolie) than he's posted to London and Berlin. Reflecting this cold-eyed dedication to the job, Damon turns in the most closed and expressionless performance of his career. No poker face has ever given less away. When his secretary in post-war Berlin offers him dinner and her bed for the night, you wonder what infinitessimal twitch of attraction she could possibly have spotted in him.

It's a realistic performance - this is probably the way a CIA spook would try to behave - but it hangs like a dead weight on the movie. Pacino in The Godfather became similarly opaque and unreachable as he ascended to power, but his character revealed the light giving way to the shade. Damon seems a blank right from the get-go.

This is also where movies about mobsters and movies about spies tend to diverge: both professions are essentially involved in stiffing people, but one has a colourful, psychotic energy driving it along while the other, by its very nature, avoids and evades. This is demonstrated in the casting: Alec Baldwin and William Hurt both crop up as mentors to Wilson without either of them disclosing any personality whatsoever. Jolie starts off by throwing herself at Damon before turning frosty with disappointment. De Niro's old confrère Joe Pesci has a cameo that's a thin shadow of his scenery-shredding in Goodfellas. The only performer to make any impression is Billy Crudup, and that's for the wrong reasons: his English spy does an accent that sounds less Kim Philby than Lord Charles.

The problem is actually built into the material: this is a film about a desk job, and no matter how it cranks up the incidental music it is stuck with the principal dramatic unit of men talking to one another behind closed doors.

Oddly enough, there is another surveillance drama out soon that deals in exactly that kind of scene, albeit in 1980s East Germany when the Stasi are the secret thieves of liberty: The Lives of Others, however, deals with the overlap of private and public lives in a spirit that passes from mysterious to something tragic and high-flown, and concludes with the satisfying smack of a great work of art. The Good Shepherd has moments of poignancy, such as when Wilson returns home from Europe after the war and finds himself a stranger to his wife and son. But it's far from a great work of art.

There is something too solemn and complacent in Roth's view of the CIA, starting with the faintly ridiculous scenes of brotherly bonding among Yale's Skull and Bones society, a stepping-stone to CIA enrolment (Roth, it should be noted, also wrote Forrest Gump.) "There's no one you can really trust," Wilson is told, more than once, but since we can see how calculating and aloof he is, the possibility of his trusting anyone seems irrelevant. Is the tragedy here the idea that his moral responses have been numbed by his scrupulous sense of duty, or is it that he was a cold fish all along and the agency simply spotted their man?

The sub-plot that dominates the last third and concerns Wilson's son, Edward Jr, trying to emulate his dad by joining the CIA, founders because that moral tension never comes alive. It doesn't help that Eddie Redmayne, playing the son, could quite easily pass as brother to Damon, who hasn't aged convincingly in the movie. De Niro deserves credit for the broad, ambitious canvas he's worked on, but his movie is just as mechanical and humourless as his protagonist.