Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #15687 in DVD
• Released on: 2007-06-18
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Aspect ratio: 2.40:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Dubbed, PAL
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: Spanish, Bulgarian, German
• Dubbed in: Spanish, German
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 160 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
A complicated movie about the Central Intelligence Agency and its agents, The Good Shepherd isn't your typical spy movie. Though it stars Matt Damon (The Bourne Identity films) and Angelina Jolie (Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Lara Croft franchise)--actors with considerable experience in the action-espionage genre--The Good Shepherd requires that they play more subdued and (much less interesting) characters here. The movie focuses on the career or Edward Wilson (Damon), a privileged Yale graduate who goes on to help found the CIA. He is a quiet, serious, and guarded man, even in the most intimate moments with his civilian wife (Jolie, in a role that wastes her talent). Set against a backdrop of real-life events such as the Bay of Pigs, The Good Shepherd is meticulous in creating a realistic timeframe. The film gets a jolt of excitement when Robert DeNiro (in his first directing role since 1993's A Bronx Tale) peppers the screen with appearances by Joe Pesci, Alec Baldwin, and William Hurt. But those moments are too infrequent. At 157 minutes long, the film is crammed with many factual details, but the characters are shortchanged when it comes to development. Viewers have to wonder why anyone, much less someone like Wilson who has everything going for him, would devote his life to a thankless job that brings so little happiness to himself and his family. The Good Shepherd is an ambitious but flawed film. The actors do a formidable job with a well-intentioned but meandering script. However, we meet so many characters and learn so little about each that it's difficult to drum up much empathy for any of them. --Jae-Ha Kim

Synopsis
With The Good Shepherd, Robert De Niro (A Bronx Tale) makes an ambitious return to the director’s chair. A labour of love for Oscar-winning screenwriter Eric Roth (Forrest Gump), the film tells an epic, fictionalised account of how the Central Intelligence Agency was born. Matt Damon plays Edward Wilson, a reserved young man who graduated from Yale in the late 1930s. His membership in the exclusive Skull and Bones society led him away from poetry and into a relationship with the federal government, who recruited him to help them on several covert operations. Roth’s script alternates between Wilson’s gradual emergence as a genuine government operative in the early 1940s and the infamous Bay of Pigs conflict in the early 1960s. Along the way, he has a sweet romance with a pretty deaf girl (a sparkling Tammy Blanchard) and ends up marrying the woman he makes pregnant (Angelina Jolie) out of a strong sense of duty. Throughout the film, the emergence of a mysterious tape haunts Wilson, who is determined to uncover the truth behind a leak in his secret organisation. Production designer Jeannine Claudia Oppewall (L.A. Confidential, Catch Me if You Can) and costume designer Ann Roth (The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley) faithfully recreate these earlier periods in American history, while the imagery of Oscar-winning cinematographer Robert Richardson (J.F.K., The Aviator) casts a warm, stately glow upon De Niro’s assembled cast of luminaries (including Alec Baldwin, Michael Gambon, William Hurt, Billy Crudup, and Joe Pesci). The result is a production that recalls Francis Ford Coppola’'s The Conversation and Steven Spielberg'’s Munich.

Customer Reviews

The Spy Who Didn't Love Anyone
This is a long, sombre film that charts the origins of the CIA from its WWII OSS roots. It follows the career of Edward Wilson (Matt Damon), a privileged Yale graduate, up to 1961 and the Bay of Pigs invasion into Cuba.

Along the way, we are shown that the early CIA was a bastion of the Ivy League Establishment. We are also given a hard look at the types of people with a flair for Intelligence work - there are no James Bonds here. Damon does well with a character it's hard to empathise with, who always puts his work first and lets his family life suffer. (The casting of Angelina Jolie as Damon's put-upon wife seemed to be stretching a point though!)

This film is an antidote to the usual, glamorous depictions of espionage that cinema gives us. The Agency operatives here, and their Russian counterparts, seem like staid civil servants most of the time, which makes the occasional scenes of violence all the more chilling, especially as there is nothing stylised about them.

The cast here is first rate (Joe Pesci has an especially entertaining cameo as a Meyer Lansky Mob figure, whose help the CIA attempt to enlist prior to the Bay of Pigs invasion - though it is not explained that Castro had confiscated the Mob's Cuban casinos upon coming to power).

De Niro has given us a film that soberly examines the world of spies and starkly shows us the human cost of the games they play.

Long, complex and compelling. Rewards careful watching
If you ever wondered how the CIA came to be, and who formed the fledgling organisation, then this is a fascinating movie. Like the novels of Robert Littell, it goes into the hidden depths of the intelligence network and examines how it formed in the aftermath of WW2, who started to work for it, and how the Company took over their lives.

Yet although The Good Shepherd is about what became a massive organisation, it's told as a very personal story. We follow Matt Damon's novice agent as he becomes an influential character, hovering on the edges of historical disasters and triumphs. We see how his life is dominated by the CIA and its secrets; how the war separated him from his wife and how his paranoia pushes them further apart.

Angelina Jolie is excellent as his wife, by the way. (If you doubt her acting ability then check out Girl Interrupted). She even ages through the decades of the story with some credibility.

Robert De Niro is the director of the film and he appears in it briefly (with a scary example of what diabetes can do to you!). There's a great supporting cast overall, but Damon takes the real credit. His character couldn't be further away from the action man Jason Bourne, and is entirely believable.

In the end, the ultimate CIA man has to make the ultimate decision. Does he betray his country or his grown up son? It's a painful and shocking ending to a long but well measured film.

Don't watch this if you're looking for James Bond thrills, but give it a go if you enjoy Le Carre-style spying. At the very least it sheds light on how good people end up doing bad things to protect the country they love. At best, it's an entralling evening's entertainment.

Bureaucracy is organised distrust.
Majestic in scope and bitty in plot.

This film quietly destroys the romantic notion of the spy in the way the spy quietly destroys everything that is sacred and noble in humanity.

A purposeful indictment of the USA during the cold war. Revealing the really nasty side of human nature.

A great film, and terrible to behold the true underbelly of American Foreign intervention.

A horrible tale of wasted lives told brilliantly. It applies to us in Britain today, to anyone who works in administration and betrays humanity for the sake of bureaucracy.