Good Shepherd = Bad Movie

Let this serve as a warning to those of you who thought The Good Shepherd would be an interesting, sort of cerebral/action movie. It wasn't. It wasn't really a drama, it didn't really tell an interesting story. The plot never really resolves in any satisfactory way. The Good Shepherd was three hours of bad movie. The characters were underdeveloped; the plot was slow; the story was uninteresting. I came out of the theater wondering just how it had taken up that much time. On later reflection, I realized that the whole film seemed like a ponderous sermon on the Dangers of Too Much Certainty. More on that later.

First: The characters. The Matt Damon character is fine: quiet, intellectual guy in search of a father figure goes off to Ivy League school, joins mysterious organization, helps start the CIA. There's a little stab at development with him – you get some college scenes, a glimpse of his relationship with his father, a look at what Might Have Been* in his life, and then you get to see him interacting with various people throughout the rest of the film.

Angelina Jolie's character, however, is total crap. And I love Angelina Jolie. She is a one-dimensional cardboard cutout of Daddy's bratty, overindulged, overaged Little Girl -- and we only get to assume that, because we never really get to see anything about her – what is her day-to-day life like? What makes her tick? Does she have any personality at all besides being a brat, first under her father's protection and then Matt Damon's? Early in the picture, she seduces him at a retreat, and he knocks her up. When he finds out he's to be a papa, he Does the Right Thing and they get married, and she spends the rest of the film whining that he's never home, stomping around and acting out because of her loveless marriage. I couldn't feel any sympathy for her character because all she did was look pretty and drink a lot. Did she love him? We have no idea. All we see is her dressed in pretty dresses, sulking around her very nice home obviously wanting for nothing, and bitching about her husband being gone off to World War II.  Maybe the people who put together this film are counting on the fact that its audience knows very little about history – that's the only way I can imagine one might sympathize with her "plight," because compared to the rest of the country she had it good. Her husband was in London, not storming the beaches of Normandy or getting massacred on Guadalcanal. So she was raising the kid, so what? Lots of women were raising kids single-handedly because their husbands were killed in combat.

And the casting was really mismatched – when they first meet, Matt Damon looks like he could be in college, and Angelina Jolie looks like she's twenty years older than he is. When they're dancing, I couldn't help looking from one to the other and wondering, Was she supposed to be the Old Maid Older Sister? Or someone's aunt? But we never know for sure, and I was left having to assume she was around his age because they age about the same amount throughout the picture.

The plot is pretty ponderous, and at times rather heavy-handed. Matt Damon doesn't talk a lot. Matt Damon likes to keep secrets.  Matt Damon wants to serve his country, and is the son of some high-ranking Navy man who dies early in his life. Matt Damon betrays someone at school for stirring up sympathy for the Nazi enemy. Matt Damon joins this shady secretive organization against his better judgment after a hazing ritual, and everything is downhill after that. He has a chance, during the war, to redeem his earlier betrayal, and instead opts for a worse one – betrayal of a person in favor of serving the intelligence service.

Through the perspective of time, we're supposed to feel doubly bad about this betrayal, because the cause of it is so senseless, as we now know. (SPOILER ALERT! From here on out.) The person he betrays is homosexual, and he's disposed of for it. (Or maybe as some sort of test for Matt Damon.) Yes, we, the modern audience, now know that homosexuality is no reason to kill someone; and that bias against homosexuals is without basis because Queers Are People Too.  We can all agree on that today, however, without forgetting how very secretive and shameful it all was back then.  The writers want us to ignore the fact that someone working very high in a nation's intelligence agencies was a huge risk for blackmail – thus, compromise of national security -- if it got out that he was gay. So this incident serves the writing by cementing the character of Matt Damon Who Is, as opposed to the carefree fellow who Might Have Been, had he walked out of that hazing ritual and stuck with the deaf girlfriend. 

The only real plot to the story is the story of how Matt Damon will stop at nothing; that no betrayal is too great in the service of his country. And that's the big climatic plot point – the ultimate betrayal to which the movie is building. And again, it's hard to care about the character involved, because he isn't developed at all; he's just a cardboard cutout and never fleshed out. All we know is that he spent his life scared, and if only Matt Damon had let his work slide in favor of his family, Angelina Jolie would not have thrown a drunken fit at a party, and the state secrets would never have been leaked, leading to the botched Bay of Pigs incident. If Matt Damon had been more willing to compromise, the movie seems to suggest, the world would be a better place. The writers apparently want us to root for this character, who knowingly leaks highly sensitive information to a spy in an effort to get Matt Damon's attention.

But the movie doesn't end there with the climatic finish; it sort of peters out with Matt Damon's character carrying on with his plans, apparently against all things good and righteous. Thus the establishment of the CIA, founded on moral failings borne of patriotic fervor. It just wasn't entertaining, and the more I pondered on it, the more it seemed like the only point to the movie was to convey this message that people who are willing to make sacrifices because they think that what they are doing is the Right Thing are going to get it in the end.

Overall, I'd give it a C-, because although the movie itself was not entertaining, it did keep me watching for all three hours, if only to try to figure out what the heck the movie was about. And I am still thinking about it more than a week later. So purely for the value of taking up my time and causing me to expend mental energy belittling it, I suppose it was worth the price of admission.  If you have to see it, my advice is to wait until it's on Netflix and free.

*Re: What Might Have Been, I suppose this is the life he could have had if he hadn't joined the shadowy organization, or hadn't agreed to go into the CIA. There's a little talk about the future, what Matt Damon and his girlfriend might be when they grow up, but very brief. Later, when they meet up again, I guess we're supposed to feel all poignant and sad for him because they should have been together; but he made his bed, quite literally, and so it's hard to feel any sympathy for him – just for her, because she's a dupe; and probably this whole subplot is intended merely to underline the theme of He Is Not a Good Person.