The Good Shepherd

Clint Eastwood and Robert De Niro are both back in the director’s chair. As actors, they may seem to have nothing in common, but they have created similar iconic moments. Eastwood with his .44 Magnum in Dirty Harry, asking a “punk” if he felt lucky; De Niro in Taxi Driver, with his concealed guns, asking an imaginary punk: “You looking at me?” Killer cop and crazy cabbie were two sides of the same coin: both out to clean up the mean streets of America.

Their new efforts have a thematic similarity that is surprising. Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima is the sequel to his previous film, Flags of Our Fathers. It tells the same story — the bloody battle for Iwo Jima during the second world war — from the Japanese point of view. The Good Shepherd is also about a battle: the one fought by the CIA to protect America. At the heart of both films are stories about the price that men, and their loved ones, pay for patriotism and the demands of duty.

The Good Shepherd shows us the birth of the CIA and the subsequent 30 years of the organisation’s history, from 1939 and the espionage war against Nazi Germany to the cold war of the 1950s. Alas, De Niro makes it seem to last longer than the Hundred Years’ War.

His painfully dry film, scripted by Eric Roth (Munich, Forrest Gump), is one of those spy films that have no interest in Boy’s Own action stuff: no guns, no gadgets, and two of the three girls wear hearing aids — the thinking girl’s bikini. There’s the usual collection of moles to be rooted out and double agents to be exposed, but what the film is really keen to show us are the men who made the CIA and the murky moral world they inhabited. It’s a critical portrait of America’s self-appointed ruling class, and it’s very tempting to see it as a critique by the Italian-American De Niro and the Jewish Roth of Wasp (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) America. Their film is essentially saying: look at these emotionally frigid people who put country before family! At the centre of the tale is Edward Wilson (Matt Damon), one of the best and brightest of the Yale class of 1939. Wilson quickly learns the art of secrecy — first from his father’s suicide, then as a member of the secret Yale club known as Skull and Bones. He is your classic silent type, with the soul of a bureaucrat, yet he gets more women throwing themselves at him than James Bond did in his last film. One is the beautiful, well-bred Margaret (Angelina Jolie), whom he gets pregnant. Doing the honourable thing, he marries her, and is then sent overseas to learn from the British the dark arts of espionage. Six years later he comes home to a wife and son he doesn’t know, and starts working for the CIA. He spends the next few decades serving his country while betraying his wife (sexually) and his duty as a dad.

As a spy film, The Good Shepherd never manages to create a gripping strand to hold our attention. The tactic of having the CIA slowly decrypt a mysterious photograph and tape that will reveal the agency’s mole was used to better effect in Kevin Costner’s No Way Out. As a portrait of a marriage falling apart, we get the usual drama: man works too hard; man doesn’t share feelings with wife. The usually excellent Damon looks miscast. He is far too young to play Wilson. And he is unable to achieve the difficult task of revealing the inner emotional life of a character who is an expert at keeping his emotional life hidden. So we’re always on the outside looking in at the unfolding drama.

Letters from Iwo Jima

Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima is just the opposite: it puts you right at the centre of events, so you really feel you know and care about the fate of his characters. Remarkably, he has managed to achieve an intimacy with his Japanese actors and characters that he never got with his American cast in Flags of Our Fathers. One sure sign of that is that you quickly forget you are reading subtitles. The film begins in 2005 with the discovery, in one of the tunnels built during the war by the Japanese on the island of Iwo Jima, of a bundle of letters written by soldiers just before the American invasion. In these letters to wives, mothers and sons are the lives, last words and longings of men about to die. Much of the film’s impact comes from nothing more than a change of perspective. It takes all the familiar features of the second-world-war scenario — the battles, the questions of courage, the drama of leadership, the complaints and fears of ordinary soldiers — and gives them an entirely new twist by showing them from the “enemy” point of view. Eastwood’s point is that they weren’t so different from us after all.

He has managed to humanise these enemy soldiers in a way no Hollywood war film has done before. It is made possible by the superb performances of the likes of Ken Watanabe, as General Kuriba-yashi, and Kazunari Ninomiya, as the dissident baker Saigo. Indeed, veterans of that war might complain that Eastwood has shown a slight bias in favour of the Japanese. It’s the Americans who are shown to be the savage ones, as when two Japanese soldiers who have surrendered are suddenly shot for no reason. And whereas in Flags of Our Fathers Eastwood was keen to deconstruct the idea of heroism, here you suspect he has a sneaking respect for the heroism of the Japanese, who, though they were outnumbered and knew they would die, fought bravely to the end.

Still, you can’t help but feel that Eastwood’s bravery in making the two films is somewhat suspect. He can challenge the ethics of war and the demonisation of an enemy decades after the event, but during the conflicts of the past 30 years he’s never taken such a stand.

Letters from Iwo Jima
Four stars
15, 140 mins

The Good Shepherd
Two stars
15, 167 mins

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