The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Shepherd

In The Good Shepherd, the acting is uniformly good, the direction creates an appropriately sinister mood and the screenplay is rich with ideas. So why did watching it feel like a homework assignment?

The Good Shepherd has all the makings of a good yarn: in tracing the growth of America’s intelligence apparatus from the ’30s to the ‘60s, the plot touches on Nazi sympathizers in America, the bombing of London, the evacuation of German and Jewish scientists from postwar Berlin, the rise of Castro, and the Bay of Pigs invasion. Spies are thrown out of airplanes, tortured with LSD and betrayed by their closest friends and students. But the last thing director Robert DeNiro wants to do in The Good Shepherd is entertain you. His vision of the rise of the CIA is devoid of glamour or adventure; as DeNiro and screenwriter Eric Roth’s see it, the most successful spooks are the ones who take no chances, the ones who keep life’s joys at bay. The more soulless the man, the better the spy.