The Good Shepherd (film)

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This article is about the 2006 film. For other uses, see Good Shepherd.

The Good Shepherd
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Robert De Niro
Produced by	Robert De Niro Jane Rosenthal Francis Ford Coppola
Written by	Eric Roth
Starring	Matt Damon Angelina Jolie William Hurt Alec Baldwin Robert De Niro Billy Crudup Michael Gambon Timothy Hutton Joe Pesci John Turturro
Music by	Bruce Fowler Marcelo Zarvos
Cinematography	Robert Richardson
Editing by	Tariq Anwar
Distributed by	Universal Pictures American Zoetrope
Release date(s)	December 22, 2006
Running time	167 min.
Country
Language	English
Budget	$85 million
Gross revenue	$100,252,761 (worldwide)
Official website
Allmovie profile
IMDb profile

The Good Shepherd is a 2006 film directed by Robert De Niro 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 De Niro, is loosely based on Major General William Joseph Donovan.

1 Plot
2 Cast
3 Production
4 Historical accuracy
5 Critical reception
6 References
7 External links

[edit] Plot

In 1961, the Bay of Pigs Invasion into Cuba fails due to a (as yet undisclosed) leak. Afterwards, a photograph and an audio recording on reel-to-reel tape are anonymously dropped off at the home of Edward Wilson (Matt Damon), a senior CIA officer.

The narrative flashes back to 1939: Wilson is attending Yale University and is a new member of Skull and Bones, a secret society that grooms future leaders of the United States. As part of his initiation, Wilson must reveal a secret about himself: he reveals that as a young boy, he discovered his father's suicide note. Wilson hid and kept the note, but has never read it. After the ceremony, a fraternity brother tells Wilson that his father, an admiral, was to be chosen as Secretary of the Navy, until his loyalties were questioned. He asks Edward what the suicide note said, and Edward repeats he never read it.

Shortly after the Skull and Bones ceremony, Wilson is recruited by an FBI agent (Alec Baldwin), who claims that Edward's poetry professor, Dr. Fredericks (Michael Gambon), is a Nazi spy. Wilson is asked to help expose the professor, which he does, resulting in Dr. Fredericks' deportation.

Wilson begins a relationship with a hearing-impaired student named Laura (Tammy Blanchard). However, while attending a Skull and Bones retreat on Deer Island, Wilson meets Margaret 'Clover' Russell (Angelina Jolie), his friend's sister. Clover aggressively seduces Wilson, and they have sex in the woods behind the Skull and Bones club house. Soon after, General Bill Sullivan (Robert De Niro), who is not a member of the Skull and Bones Society, asks Wilson to join the OSS, offering him a post in London.

Later, while Wilson and Laura are at the beach, Clover's brother arrives and privately talks to him. The brother reveals Clover is pregnant with Wilson's child and asks if he will, "do what is expected." Laura, able to read lips, sees this and walks away. Wilson marries Clover, and during the wedding reception, an army courier arrives, reiterating General Sullivan's offer for a position at the OSS London office. He accepts, whereupon the courier then hands over Wilson's orders, requiring him to be in England in one week. Clover is to remain in the US. To his surprise, Wilson's former university professor, Dr. Fredericks, is also in London; he is actually a member of British Intelligence. While at Yale, he had sought to infiltrate a Nazi organization, causing the American authorities to suspect he was a Nazi spy. Edward betraying his professor ruined two years of espionage work. Despite this, Fredericks recognized Edward's gifts and recommended him to be trained in counter-espionage methods in London.

Soon after, a British intelligence officer, Arch Cummings (Billy Crudup), tells Wilson that Fredericks' indiscriminate homosexual relationships pose a security risk and asks Edward to deal with his former mentor. As they walk, Fredericks refuses Wilson's chivalrous suggestion to protect himself by returning to teaching, and he, in turn, advises Wilson to, "quit the dirty work . . . while you still have a soul." However, he understands if Wilson wants to, "tie his shoe" (a signal to watchers that the meeting had gone badly). Wilson demurs, which prompts Fredericks to kneel down and tie Wilson's shoe for him. As their meeting ends, Fredericks leaves Wilson, and, after turning a street corner, is killed and his body dumped into the river.

The timeline moves to post-war Berlin, where the Allies and the Soviets, in a race for technological superiority, are vying to recruit as many German scientists as possible. Wilson encounters his Soviet counterpart, codenamed "Ulysses", who praises Wilson as a formidable adversary. Wilson interviews potential German informants with the aid of a female interpreter, Hanna Schiller (Martina Gedeck), who wears a hearing aid. When Wilson makes a rare phone call home, he inadvertently learns from his young son, Edward, Jr., that Clover is seeing another man. After the phone call, Hanna enters Wilson's office and invites him to her house. After cooking dinner, she invites him to stay, and they end up having sex . While lying in bed, Wilson realizes that Hanna does not need her hearing aid, exposing her as a Soviet operative who has infiltrated OSS activities. Wilson has Hanna killed and notifies Ulysses by having her hearing aid planted into his tea pot.

After six years in London, Wilson returns to the United States and is greeted by Clover (who now prefers to be called Margaret). Wilson presents his son with a miniature model ship he made that is inside a glass watch casing. He then learns from Margaret that her brother was killed in the war, and she confesses that she had seen another man. When she asks if he had any relationships, Wilson replies that, "it was a mistake." She suggests they sleep in separate bedrooms until they get to know each other again, to which Wilson agrees. General Sullivan approaches Wilson again to help form a new foreign intelligence organisation (the CIA) where Wilson will work with his former colleague, Richard Hayes (Lee Pace), under Phillip Allen (William Hurt). Wilson accepts, hiding the details about his job from his wife's friends and other acquaintances.

Wilson's first assignment deals with an unnamed Central American coffee growing country where the Russians are trying to gain influence. Wilson spots Ulysses in the background of some stock footage of the country's leader, but chooses not to share this information with others in the room. An agent is sent undercover as a representative of the Mayan coffee company. In order to intimidate the Central American leader, Wilson arranges for airplanes to fly over and release locusts during a public event where the Russians (including Ulysses) are present. Wilson later receives a can of Mayan coffee, presumably from Ulysses, containing the severed finger of the American agent.

Wilson interviews Valentin Mironov, a Russian requesting asylum and claiming to be a high-ranking official who knows Ulysses. While attending the theatre with Mironov and Cummings, Wilson unexpectedly encounters his former sweetheart, Laura. Wilson and Laura leave the theatre separately, then meet at a restaurant and discuss old times before having sex at Laura's house.

Sometime later when Wilson has gone ahead to a Skull and Bones dinner, Margaret anonymously receives photos of Laura and Wilson getting into a taxi together and kissing. A distraught Margaret confronts him at the dinner. Wilson ends the relationship with Laura by sending her jewelled crucifix to her by messenger, which he had kept from their college romance days.

Wilson receives a call from a Soviet defector (Mark Ivanir) claiming that he is the real Valentin Mironov, and the person they know as Valentin is an imposter: his real name is Yuri Modin, a KGB operative working for Ulysses. Wilson disbelieves him, and agents torture the Russian in an attempt to uncover his true identity. The defector never changes his story, even enduring a form of waterboarding. Eventually, he is administered liquid LSD which causes erratic behavior, but he solidly clings to his stated identity; he shouts that he is Valentin Mironov and commits suicide by crashing through a glass window to the pavement several stories below. This is apparently based on^{[citation needed]} an actual event when US Army scientist, (Frank Olson), died in a similar way, allegedly as a result of unwittingly participating in CIA-conducted LSD experiments called MKULTRA. The first man claiming to be Mironov, who witnessed the ordeal from behind a two-way mirror with Wilson, offers to take LSD to prove his innocence.

Wilson visits his son, Edward, Jr., at Yale, where he has also joined the Skull and Bones society and has been approached for recruitment by the CIA. Margaret (Clover) pleads with Wilson to persuade their son not to join, but Edward Jr. joins anyway, believing it will bring him closer to his loving, but distant father. This widens the rift between Wilson and Margaret, and she eventually leaves him and moves to Arizona to live with her mother. Later, while at a Skull and Bones retreat, Wilson discusses the upcoming Bay of Pigs invasion with Hayes. Edward, Jr., eavesdrops on the discussion and a reference to "Bahía de Cochinos", Spanish for "Bay of Pigs." Wilson suspects that Edward, Jr. may have inadvertently overhead the conversation and warns his son to repeat nothing that was discussed.

Time passes, and the Bay of Pigs invasion fails. The CIA thoroughly analyzes the photograph (which depicts a Caucasian man and a colored woman making love) and the edited version of the tape that was anonymously dropped at Wilson's house earlier in the movie. From visual clues such as the ceiling fan's brand name and the church bells and other sounds heard on the tape, CIA specialists deduce that the photograph may have been taken in Leopoldville, Congo. Wilson goes there and finds the room. He realizes that the photograph and tape are of his son Edward, Jr., when he sees the model ship in the glass watch casing that he gave his son is sitting on the nightstand; its blurred image was the one object in the photo that the CIA team was unable to identify. Ulysses has apparently been awaiting Wilson's arrival. He plays Wilson an unedited version of the tape, which reveals that Edward, Jr. repeated "Bahía de Cochinos", the classified information he overheard his father discussing, to his lover—a Soviet spy. It is that information that led to the Cubans' and Soviets' knowledge regarding the CIA landing at the Bay of Pigs. Ulysses reveals that the woman spy has truly fallen in love with Edward, Jr. Ulysses encourages Wilson to spy for the Soviets in exchange for them protecting his son. Wilson is non-committal, however; he confronts his son, who says that he is in love with the woman and plans to marry her. When Wilson tells him she is a spy, Edward, Jr. refuses to believe him.

Wilson exposes Valentin as a Soviet spy after finding evidence hidden in the book binding of a copy of Ulysses: inside are a passport with his real name and an escape plan. Arch Cummings is also exposed as a co-conspirator. In an earlier scene, Cummings gave the book to Valentin as a seemingly clever benign gift, playing on Valentin's knowledge about Ulysses, the Soviet spy. Arch Cummings flees to the USSR. After this, Wilson declines to run counter-intelligence for the Soviets. Ulysses notes of Edward, Jr.'s fiancée: "neither of us can be sure about her", and asks Wilson, "Do you want her to be part of your family?" When Wilson does not respond, Ulysses makes a reference to Wilson doing him a future favor, having placed Wilson in a compromising position. During a meeting at a museum, Ulysses' aide asks him for change to purchase his daughter a souvenir from the gift shop. Wilson asks how much it is, and, upon hearing it is a dollar, hands him a one dollar note, commenting that a cardinal rule of democracy is generosity. This appears to be a reference to a scene from the film's beginning, where a young boy on a bus asks Wilson for change for a dollar—when Wilson returns to his office, he matches the bill's serial number to a CIA asset codenamed "CARDINAL". So Wilson is, in fact, returning the "marked" dollar to the asset, which is Ulysses' aide.

Wilson and Margaret arrive separately in the Congo for Edward, Jr.'s wedding. His fiancée boards a small plane to travel to the ceremony. In mid-flight, she is thrown out the door by the co-pilot. When she fails to arrive at the church, Wilson informs a worried Edward Jr. that his fiancée is dead. Edward, Jr. tearfully asks his father if he had anything to do with her death, to which Wilson denies any responsibility. Edward Jr. reveals that his fiancée was pregnant; this news shocks and saddens Wilson.

Wilson then meets with fellow Skull and Bones classmate, Hayes (loosely based on Richard Helms), at the new CIA headquarters still under construction, Hayes tells him that Allen is resigning under a cloud of financial improprieties, and that the President has asked him to be the new Director. The President has directed him to do some "house cleaning" and he tells Wilson that he needs someone he can trust, saying, "after all, we're still brothers" and that Wilson is the "Heart and Soul of the CIA". He then shows Wilson a wing of the CIA that will be Edward's "part of the world" and tells him he will be the first head of counter-intelligence.

Wilson is then shown opening a floor safe in his closet and pulling out the suicide note that his father, Thomas had left before killing himself. Wilson finally reads the note, in which his father's words reveal that he had betrayed his country. He left loving words for his wife and Wilson, particularly urging his son to grow up to be a good man, husband, and father and to live a life of decency and truth. Wilson burns the note.

The movie ends with Wilson walking in his, now completed, wing of the CIA.

[edit] Cast

Actor	Role
Matt Damon	Edward Wilson
Angelina Jolie	Margaret 'Clover' Russell Wilson
Robert De Niro	Bill Sullivan
Alec Baldwin	Sam Murach
Billy Crudup	Arch Cummings
Tammy Blanchard	Laura
Keir Dullea	Senator John Russell, Sr.
Dan Fleury	Skull and Bones associate Ed Farmer
Michael Gambon	Dr. Fredericks
Martina Gedeck	Hanna Schiller
Timothy Hutton	Thomas Wilson
William Hurt	Philip Allen
Gabriel Macht	John Russell, Jr.
Lee Pace	Richard Hayes
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

[edit] 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"^{[citation needed]} (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 to 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.”^[2] 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.”^[2] 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.^[2] 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. High-ranking British operative turned Soviet mole, Arch Cummings, bears some similarities to Kim Philby (who fled to the USSR after being exposed and spent his last years friendless and mired in alcoholism). The character Yuri Modin shares similar characteristics to Soviet defector Anatoliy Golitsyn, and the character of Dr. Ibanez bears some similarities to Jacobo Arbenz.

In May, 2007, CIA's historians publicly released an article referencing the film's depiction of the OSS and CIA, and discussing factual details surrounding the actual persons on whom some of the film's characters were based. The article also addressed inaccurate but enduring beliefs that Yale's famous secret society Skull and Bones was an incubator of the U.S. Intelligence Community.^[4]

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.

[edit] Historical accuracy

The film takes many liberties with the historic events it portrays. Notably, the film inaccurately depicts the Bay of Pigs failure as the result of a leak within the agency. In fact, the CIA's own analysis came to the conclusion that the Bay of Pigs Invasion failed because of a combination of incompetent planning and execution, unrealistic expectations, and poor security.

A Crime So Immense, an article by James K. Galbraith states that a previously redacted version of the Taylor Report on the Bay of Pigs shows the Russians did know the date of the planned invasion.

"One of the great travesties of the Cold War surfaced on April 29, when the Washington Post reported the declassification in full of General Maxwell Taylor's June, 1961 special report on the Bay of Pigs invasion. Partial versions of this document have been available for decades. But only now did its darkest secret spill. Here is what Taylor reported to Kennedy. The Russians knew the date of the invasion (Therefore, Castro also knew). The CIA, headed by Allen Dulles, knew that the Russians knew (Therefore, they knew the invasion would fail). The leak did not come from the invasion force; it had happened before the Cuban exiles were themselves briefed on the date. Kennedy was not informed. Nor, of course, were the exiles. And knowing all this, Dulles ordered the operation forward."

[edit] Critical reception

The film received mixed reviews with the review tallying website rottentomatoes.com reporting that 89 out of the 161 reviews they tallied were positive for a score of 55% and a certification of "rotten" (according to the website's criteria).^[5] Metacritic gave the film a metascore of 66/100 ("Generally favorable reviews").^[6] Time magazine ^[7] 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 ^[8] 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."

Current Event Magazine GlobeMag gave the acting a score 8/10, while the plot/writing received a score of 5/10, saying the movie "...was like a slow pulse, nothing...then something...nothing...then something, making for an uneventful and generally confusing movie..."

Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly praises De Niro's direction and Damon's performance, noting the latter's maturation as an actor. She gives the movie a grade of "B"^[9].

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."

In 2007, the cast of The Good Shepherd won the silver bear of the prestigious Berlin film festival for outstanding artistic contribution. It was the only American entry in 2007 to win a prize at the festival. The film was also an Oscar nominee in 2007.