My reviews of The History Boys and The Good Shepherd are on Pajamas. Have at me.
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I saw both movies and Roger’s reviews are correct.
The History Boys is a visual and dialogue treat.
The Good Shepherd is a disaster packed with misplaced stars acting out a disjointed script with DeNiro jumping from the movie’s director to his role as the gimpy “OSS Director Sullivan;” note, the Irish name, the invented name for the real Wild Bill Donovan. Yes, Bobby DeNiro playing an Irish aristocratic lawyer with a bad foot. Matt Damon plays the role of James Jesus Angleton, the legendary CIA operative of the 60s. Stiff, unemotional, the supreme patriot with bitchy Angelina as the jilted forgotten wife.
I am still trying to determine if the climax of the movie is the weak scene of Matt Damon’s son and that story line. The movie is so obtuse that one comes out scratching one’s head.
Roger’s comment about Yale is partially correct; it is really about Yale’s Skull and Bones Society which holds annual frat boy reunions complete with tuxedos at a LL Bean store in Maine. Just kidding
“Yes, Bobby DeNiro playing an Irish aristocratic lawyer with a bad foot.”
The bad foot, parts of it were being pared off due to diabetes, was a clunky symbolism of diminishing constitutional rights, or decreasing restrictions on CIA powers. Which one, my memory is fuzzy, and won’t pay to see again.
As for being Angleton, the character was that and a hodgepodge more. Skull and Bones? G H W Bush??
It took me a while to figure out the cricket bombs on the Guatamala-like coffee fields. If the USA was aiming to protect US owned coffee plant fields, why destroy them? The Arbenz-like character is not overthrown in the movie as in real life, which I’ve seen real CIA folks say is the one action they regret. Later by chance I read something that gave possible “context”, the North Koreans accused the USA of insect drops to spread bio weapons. I thought showing an assassination of the Arbenz-like man would have made more sense, and a better movie. Heck, in “Munich”, a film it mimics, the first kill is an Edward Said clone. Top that!
One problem with Damon’s son was the director’s self-satisfaction he found an actor who amazingly looked like a cross between Damon and Jolie. OK, I get it! The lips! End the cold camera on his face! You did good, we know!
There were interesting parts, perhaps the “climax” was Damon handing over the dollar bill to the KGB. I don’t think it signaled he was a mole, rather it was probably a pay back, outing a US spy, in return for the KGB offing Damon’s son’s fiance in Katanga. The interpretation depends on an earlier scene with Damon and dollar bills and their serial numbers, which at the time seemed to be merely a visual comment on spycraft rather than a plot point.
Roger,
I reread your article and something rang a bell. On this thread and one earlier I wrote The Good Shepherd has similarities to Munich. Turns out Eric Roth, writer of Shepherd, wrote a script to Munich, though he was uncredited having turned it over to Tony Kushner for a re-write.
In Shepherd there is an over-wrought ethnic classifications like when Pesci says, “The Jews have their traditions, the Italians have their families,” –don’t both, and everyone, have the other too?–and in Munich Jews are linked much with traditions. I don’t know how much of Munich remained Roth – the hokey and culturally erroneous placement of three, three! hanukah (nine-stemmed) menorahs at mother’s home, but surely mother being an Ethel Rosenberg look-alike was Kushner’s idea(see “Angels”), and the Marxish politics and Edward Said voiceover and character was Kushner’s too. I’d like to see the drafts of Munich to see if someone other than Kushner wrote the French cheese scene, one of the unintentionally funniest things I’ve ever watched.
Minor correction:
Roth might have been “credited” with Munich, but apparently there was some kind of to-do about him not being nominated for an Oscar as was Kushner.