Saw this today and I have to say that I was blown away. I could see some poeple thinking the pace too slow and deliberate, but it never felt that way to me.
I also have to say that Damon has really impressed me this year as an actor. Always thought he did solid work, but he played an awesome spineless weasel in The Departed, and he plays his emotionally shut down company man to perfection.
This movie is FUCKING FANTASTIC. There is almost nothing wrong with it: great script, great acting, really great direction. Just excellent all around. As I’ve waited for Tom to release his Movies of 2006 thread, I’ve been thinking “Wow, nothing is even close to Little Miss Sunshine for me this year.” Well, sorry Little Miss Sunshine, but welcome to the #2 spot.
I saw a review that described this as “The Godfather of spy movies,” and that is 100% apt. This is a really excellent film. Go see it.
Really? So all the reviews that say that it is overlong, slow, muddled and uninteresting are wrong?
I mean, I am hoping the review are wrong since I’ve been looking forward to this one for a while. Now I can’t decide: Rywill and awdoughety’s recommendations or the legion of critics. Argh.
Trust Rywill. I’ll go see this on the strength of his recommend.
That, and Matt Damon is a kick ass actor.
I couldn’t follow the second half of the movie at all. Maybe it really does all make sense but a lot of the plot points were way too subtle for me. I didn’t think it was too slow or too long; I just wish I knew what was going on.
I’ll warn you that I’m the sort of person who doesn’t mind slow movies that much. It’s definitely long (three hours), but it doesn’t seem long when you’re watching it and it’s one of the only three-hour movies I’ve ever seen where there isn’t some scene or plotline that I thought “They should have cut that.” It definitely isn’t muddled – but it IS very complex, and it can be hard to follow if you’re not paying attention the whole time. God help you if you get up to use the restroom.
I can understand someone criticizing it for being slow and too long, but I just don’t agree. It’s long, but the material justifies it; and it unfolds slowly, but that’s the sort of movie it is – and it’s interesting the entire time. Continuing the Godfather comparison, that was also long and unfolded pretty slowly. But still a great movie.
One thing about Matt Damon: he doesn’t really get much of a chance to act in this. He’s good at what he’s called on to do, but his character is so stonefaced and wooden that Damon doesn’t get much chance to show his chops (as my dad put it, “Damon was terrific – he runs the entire range from stoic to emotionless”). He actually does a good job with it, using very subtle changes in facial expression or posture to show his emotion, but it’s not what you would think of as an Oscar role, for example.
I have to say that I strongly disagree with the critics panning this film. It’s not too slow or too complicated for my tastes, but it definitely is much more deliberately paced than most films. There are a lot of characters and a lot of interactions that you have to pay attention to. It’s not going to hold your hand too much through the story, but I never felt it made leaps that left me behind.
I also wonder what some of these critics would say of an old school John Le Carre novel, because I felt those books and this movie have a lot in common.
Lastly, this movie started off as an attempt to translate Norman Mailer’s book, Harlot’s Ghost, to the big screen for Francis Ford Coppolla. I’ve read the book and enjoyed it immensely, along with Robert Little’s The Company. Both novels are long journeys following one man’s career through the infancy of the CIA, both had very similar paces to The Good Shepherd, and it always felt right for this kind of story. Based on my experiences with those novels, I personally would have been disappointed had The Good Shepherd been handled in any other way.
That’s interesting that you felt that way. I definitely agree that Damon probably can’t get Oscar recognition for this role, I felt like I was watching someone acting the hell out of the part. For me, the beauty of his performance was that I’ve never seen so many faces to stoic detachment. His face remains stone, but somehow it never felt the same way twice as he had to face each obstacle and add it to the list of things that he could never allow to affect him. By the end, just the way he walked, the body language of his shoulders, I felt like I was really watching someone beaten into the ground by 20+ years of brutal, thankless service.
Overall there were so many great performances in this movie. I never thought all that much of A Bronx Tale… who knew De Niro had this film in him? Really masterfully made.
Fantastic book. I can’t remember if they actually used “the Godfather of spy novels” to promote the book, but The Company was the first thing to pop into my mind when they used that tagline to promote Good Shepherd.
Awesome movie… I loved The Company, as well, and that’s what I thought of while watching the movie…
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
The plot is dense, and it certainly helps if you have a good background in the entire Cold War espionage thing. Like the infamous Cambridge ring of double-agents (of whom Kim Philby was the most infamous), the one that fucked British intelligence in the first part of the Cold War. Clearly, Damon’s British counterpart is supposed to be a part of this ring.
Basically Damon is “Mother” and the main Soviet KGB guy is “Ulysses”, and they’re playing a cat-and-mouse game with one another for two decades.
Part of that is slipping fake defectors into one another’s camp, while other parts is trying to basically blackmail each other into betraying their countries. Well, that’s what Ulysses is doing. Damon is basically trying to overthrow Castro.
Ulysses slips the fake Morinov into the CIA’s custody, and he uses the British traitor to slip Morinov the book full of codes and everything else, cause the CIA would have stripped him of everything as part of the debriefing and screening process. Once in place, the fake Morinov is able to get inside info to Ulysses, including probably the fact that Damon’s son has been tucked away in the Belgium Congo station because it’s the “safest” place to assign a CIA agent. After all, what’s going to happen in the Congo? The KGB slips him a little honey trap, which he falls for, and they try and use that to break Damon.
At the same time, Allen (William Hurt) has been used as a red herring of sorts for the audience. However, he’s not a traitor, just corrupt. Once Damon gets the FBI files on Allen from a dying-of-cancer Alec Baldwin, he has the pieces he needs to bust him.
Obvious questions…
Who put the hit on the son’s pregnant fiancee?
The dollar that Damon gives the KGB guy at the Smithsonian was probably another red herring for the audience, given the opening scene of the movie. Makes you wonder about Damon’s loyalties a bit more, though it seems fairly certain he’s a guy who will sacrifice everything for his country.
3.When did Joe Pesci get so damn old? It makes me sad.
- Who put the hit on the son’s pregnant fiancee?
Damon did when Ulysses asked him what to do about her since neither of them could trust her now. He didn’t say a word. Just let the implication stand that she knew too much (just like his old mentor).
- The dollar that Damon gives the KGB guy at the Smithsonian was probably another red herring for the audience, given the opening scene of the movie. Makes you wonder about Damon’s loyalties a bit more, though it seems fairly certain he’s a guy who will sacrifice everything for his country.
Seems that way. My initial take was that it was an attempt to show a glimmer of uncalculated interaction between the adversaries as a contrast to everything else. Or it might have been a signal of some sort.
I rather enjoyed it but I was really hoping for more on the CIA and less on the character drama. I was also disappointed they changed all the names though it’s not too hard to sort out the principals. Allen is Dulles and so on. But it makes you wonder what was dramatized and what was based on reality. It was long, very long, and I frankly didn’t feel invested enough in either the characters or the plot to care that much where it was going. We’re talking about, primarily, very and deliberately bland characters and a rather subtle plot spun out over many hours…
I think I also hold an unfair grudge against the Good Shepard for not dealing with Iran in '54 at all. That’s something I’d love to see someone make a movie about.
SPOILERS!!!
Did that Damon dollar scene come when they were talking about how the pregnant fiancee would be joining Damon’s family but was unreliable? For some reason I thought that’s when it was and that meant, for me, that Damon absolutely had something to do with her death.
I took his scene with Jolie and the son at the church, when she asks him “What did you do?” to be essentially the same scene in the Godfather when Pacino allows Keaton to ask him just this one time about his business, then flat out lies to her.
I definitely agree with this sentiment, and they definitely glossed over central america, at least when compared to the novels mentioned in this thread.
Did you guys see a different movie? The Good Shepard is NOT a good film, nor is it particularly complex. If you think about the plot, it’s actually pretty darn simple.
I would say that muddled and slow are the right adjectives for this film.
What was the significance of the white hair (?) that fell out of the book Ulysses when Matt Damon shook it out?
I think the critics that say this is overly long and boring are wrong. I also don’t agree with the comparison to The Godfather. Yes there are some surface parallels, but Godfather operates with the subtlety of a baseball bat to the head. The Good Shepard is much mored layered. I thought Damon was excellent in this movie and showed that real top quality acting doesn’t require big grandiose speeches.
Spoiler-ish: I think the most critical reason for the slow pacing is that this is not just a story of who whacks who, but entirely a story and commentary on the CIA, past and present. There are many noble intentions and difficult but patriotic decisions in the first half of the movie, and the audience slowly learns to trust and support the stony lead character. Then piece by piece the true nature and make up of the CIA is shown and eventually a scathing indictment is delivered against it. I’d say it compares better with Syriana than a mob movie.
It’s probably not movie of the year, but it is very good and demands your thought and attention.
They set out to create an emotionless, humorless matt damon and they succeeded. Why I am supposed to care about him or his family is beyond me. His son at the end? Oh I fucked up the bay of pigs, but no matter, LETS PARTY!!!
The whole movie was so melodramatic and heavy handed that it was laughable. I was not alone laughing out loud over the heavy handed, obvious ending to his son’s wife.
But it did spawn a drinking game. Every time someone says something and Damon responds with a silent stare, drink a thimble full of beer. You will be passed out 30 minutes into the worst film of 2006.
Chet
Spoilers
How did his son “fuck up the bay of pigs”? Didn’t you see who the informant(s) were? CIA was leaking like a sieve.
The whole movie was so melodramatic and heavy handed that it was laughable. I was not alone laughing out loud over the heavy handed, obvious ending to his son’s wife.
That you saw it coming is not a fault of the movie. I’d say you win a most jaded moviegoer prize if you had no sympathy for the way she meets her end.
Every time someone says something and Damon responds with a silent stare, drink a thimble full of beer.
It’s a testament to his acting and the script that we can read his responses despite his silence.
Of course his son did nothing wrong and the focus of half the freakng movie was a red herring that the rest of the CIA just ignored…
My fault that I saw it coming? Are you kidding me? The only thing the movie didn’t do was print that it was going to happen on my movie ticket. If you didn’t see that coming, you must not get out much.
As for his laughable acting, even de niro knew there was nothing there. half the time (which would be 52,323,889 times), they did a 3/4 shot of Damon so his glasses obscured most of his face - blocking his “acting”.
And what were his responses? Ugh.
Part of that is slipping fake defectors into one another’s camp, while other parts is trying to basically blackmail each other into betraying their countries. Well, that’s what Ulysses is doing. Damon is basically trying to overthrow Castro.
Nope. Not true, all Damon was doing was reacting, he never did much of anything, we never saw anything, we were just told. The CIA was built by not taking action. He was great in england… really? What did we see? We are never shown these moments that define him and the CIA, at best he saw someone talking on the phone about something, at worst (the bulk of the movie), we were told something happened. Movies should show, not tell but that is all this movie did.
Um, no, his son did do something wrong. His son was in a lot of trouble, but he didn’t “fuck up the Bay of Pigs”. It’s not a red herring at all, it’s directly about Wilson and in turn about the nature of the CIA.
My fault that I saw it coming? Are you kidding me? The only thing the movie didn’t do was print that it was going to happen on my movie ticket. If you didn’t see that coming, you must not get out much.
Um, no, where did I say it was your fault? It’s not a fault, period. You should have realized that Wilson wanted her dead the moment it was brought up by Ulysses, but without certainty. The length of time it carried the travel scenes and its intercutting with the wedding chapel, are filmic devices. If the only thing that was on your mind is “Well, are they going to kill her or not?”, then there’s no wonder you missed the soul of this movie.
As for his laughable acting, even de niro knew there was nothing there. half the time (which would be 52,323,889 times), they did a 3/4 shot of Damon so his glasses obscured most of his face - blocking his “acting”.
Right, because you can only act if you have your full face uncovered and in close-up. No one could act with a mask of some sort, that’s just crazy shit, and completely unheard of in the history of theatrical performance.
Nope. Not true, all Damon was doing was reacting, he never did much of anything, we never saw anything, we were just told. The CIA was built by not taking action. He was great in england… really? What did we see? We are never shown these moments that define him and the CIA, at best he saw someone talking on the phone about something, at worst (the bulk of the movie), we were told something happened. Movies should show, not tell but that is all this movie did.
Ok, now your actually starting to get some of this movie, except that the problem is you’re assuming that it was one kind of movie, one where they show technical details and the unfolding of historical events, when it’s a movie about the soul of the CIA as told through the soul of one man, Wilson. If you just got off a boat and knew nothing about the CIA before seeing this movie, it would not make much sense to you.