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January 12, 2007 > Arts & Entertainment > Putting the good back in The Good Shepherd

Putting the good back in The Good Shepherd

By Julia Bursten | Thresher Editorial Staff

I can only think of a handful of things that make living my life truly good. One is exploring and discussing the limits of human thought and action; another is attempting to unravel and give order to the mysteries of the world around me. Recently, I found a film that demanded both these things from its viewers. So I was shocked when the very same film appeared to be a disappointment, not a celebrated success, in the eyes of the American viewing public.

The Good Shepherd, director Robert De Niro’s pet project for the last decade or so, is supposed to tell a fictionalized story about the birth of the CIA and American intelligence-gathering. And it does. But under that story is a double-agent web of ethical dilemmas that hold the fates of nations in the balance, questions about the psychological boundaries of our understanding of human action, and tests of trust and familial love in the face of war, politics and death. It is complex. It is moving. It is beautiful and sometimes mortifying. And it reminds me of one more thing that makes life worth living: Really good art.

The film is mainly about puzzles, from the life-and-death game of Clue that comprised the CIA’s early days to the puzzling psychology of the protagonist, Edward Wilson (Good Will Hunting’s Matt Damon). I thought De Niro and screenwriter Eric Roth collaborated with great success to maintain an intellectually engaging level of suspense and complexity throughout the film, and Damon pulls off inner torture with almost no expression in a performance that makes Hannibal Lecter look like a simple case of a Freudian slip.

So the puzzle to me is why The Good Shepherd has been all but written off by both critics and box offices — its grosses are trailing Charlotte’s Web by more than $10 million, for crying out loud, and Robert Wilonsky’s review in The Village Voice called Wilson empty and barely human. How can I find so much where the American public and renowned critics see so little?

The answer may simply be that I like puzzles more than the average moviegoer. But I can hardly believe that’s the case, what with the Sudoku craze of recent years. It is more likely that the puzzles in The Good Shepherd are ones many viewers simply were not looking for. I was too wrapped up in the ethical, psychological and epistemological questions the movie raised to notice the problems Variety.com did, namely “that the director never finds a proper rhythm to allow the viewer to settle comfortably into what turns out to be a very long voyage.” I was thinking deeply about the film as it was happening — not after the house lights came up.

The increasing popularity of film studies courses across the country suggests that there is a growing population of viewers who like to think deeply about movies. So it would seem gratifying to let such thought occur during a movie itself. As Wilson follows the dry cleaning tag left in a forgotten hat to a set of incriminating, top-secret files, viewers should and do have time to consider the implications of mankind being able to carefully arrange such apparent coincidences.

It made me wonder, at least, about the possibility that no such thing as coincidence exists. If that were the case, every strange event in our lives is part of a meaningful puzzle, and it is up to us to track down what messages we’re being sent — that’s Edward Wilson’s job. It is the job of scholars in many religions and it is the job of theoretical physicists. It appears that most thinking people make a habit of putting order to seeming chaos, and The Good Shepherd provided just one illustration the power of that practice to the development of the modern United States.

The movie was slower than Casino Royale, sure, but it was beautifully dense and paced to let viewers process the dilemmas Wilson faced at every turn. And yes, Edward’s wife could have been any actress with a pretty smile and a sense of pride — using Angelina Jolie in the part was a throwaway, to be sure. But even her quick feint of copulation and conception raised interesting moral and ethical questions: Should Wilson stay with the deaf girl he loves or marry the girl he does not really know but got pregnant? Was it wrong of him to have slept with her in the first place? Because Wilson is so stoic and mistrustful of the world around him, The Good Shepherd leaves it up to the viewer, not the character, to begin and end these debates.

There’s a definite trend started toward producing movies for thinking people. Such films often raise more questions than they answer and challenge viewers with complex characters and difficult, often just plain weird, situations. The Good Shepherd simply moved that trend out of the camp of directors like Wes Anderson and films like I Heart Huckabees, and into Hollywood. And, when I think about it, I couldn’t be more grateful.

Julia Bursten is a Lovett College junior and senior editor.This one’s for professors Kulstad and Sher.

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