Christmas Day 2006 into early 2007: The Good Shepherd makes $100 million against an $80 million budget. No movie that huge turns a profit maybe until the budget is doubled. Matt Damon may have been able to get The Good Shepherd off the ground after the project went from director to director through the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s (John Frankenheimer was going to do it around 2002, and then he died), but it got him nothing but a great performance in a great movie—what’s an Oscar next to that? A lot, I guess. The insanity of this season in particular is baffling, especially when you look at the actors who’ve gotten Oscars early in their careers. It’s a bit of a jinx, not even for first-timers or quick-risers: look at Bong Joon-Ho. It’s taken him six years to follow up Parasite after that movie won the Palme d’Or and a ton of Oscars, including Best Director and Best Picture. He made his Oscars kiss, a magnificent moment, and now Warner Brothers is dumping his Mickey 17 in March for some reason.
It’s just bad timing. The Good Shepherd was released within weeks of The Departed, which shares not only Damon but Alec Baldwin. That was the movie of the year, the chance to finally give Martin Scorsese some Oscars, and Damon’s performance as Edward Wilson Sr. got lost in the mix, and subsequently, ignored in contemporary film history. De Niro, whose only other directorial effort is 1994’s A Bronx Tale, works with cinematographer Robert Richardson (JFK, Nixon, Kill Bill, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) to deliver an unusually dark Hollywood film about the birth of the CIA, with Damon’s Wilson loosely based on James Jesus Angleton. He’s since played variations on this kind of blank bureaucrat void in movies like The Informant! and Suburbicon, and It’s the role he’s most suited for. I don’t buy Damon as the fairytale Boston genius in Good Will Hunting with that accent, and he stands out as a sore thumb MOVIE STAR in Interstellar, The Martian, and all of the Jason Bourne films, largely unwatchable due to their insane editing.
In two and a half hours, Damon goes from walking in on his father’s suicide (he takes the note but doesn’t open it), to promising young Yale Man and Skull and Bones Brother, to a young department called the O.S.S. He sees it out through the 1960s, largely ignoring his wife (Angelina Jolie) and son (Eddie Redmayne), also a Skull and Bones Brother and agent of the new CIA. He doesn’t completely ignore his son, making sure his pregnant wife is thrown out of an airplane because she knows too much about something, and leaks have consequences. In his defense, he didn’t know she was pregnant. But that shot of Redmayne’s wife being shoved out of a plane has stuck in my mind for 18 years. I hadn’t seen it since Christmas Day 2006, and what blew me away the other day was I had completely misremembered who got thrown out of the plane and what the shot looked like. I can still see Damon in a tan raincoat free falling in a medium shot over a night sky, but it never existed. I don’t know what happened. The camera jerks and pauses as it zooms in on Redmayne’s wife falling to her death, imitating an amateur photographer; it’s one of the most brutal and effective shots of its kind.
The grand American drama is filled with as many name actors as possible, the only way to make a movie like this commercial. For a long movie about the birth of the CIA, you need at least 10 “oooooooooh” names to fit alongside each other on the poster. Along with Damon, Jolie, and Baldwin are De Niro, John Turturro, Michael Gambon, Timothy Hutton, Keir Dullea, Billy Crudup, Joe Pesci, and William Hurt (Redmayne wasn’t yet a name, nor Lee Pace, if he ever quite got there). I don’t like all of these actors, but they make for a good poster. Whatever works to sell something beyond the Tom Clancy audience that was already thinned out in 2006.
The Good Shepherd breezes through its epic fictionalization of history, never going beyond the surface of Damon’s commanding and scary performance. The movie’s full of awkward axial cuts, likely the product of too much coverage by an indecisive director rather than a conscious stylistic choice employed to unsettle the audience in already tense and paranoid film. Eric Roth’s script is all one-liners, but that’s not what keeps it from ever going too deep. The Good Shepherd is often terrifying, but so much of it is handled plainly, without any of the flourishes or eccentricities of someone like Oliver Stone; he merely borrows from JFK here and there, deploying sound collages of period radio broadcasts, extreme close-up inserts of photographs blurred beyond belief, and the actors. The actors are who make The Good Shepherd, icons of Hollywood retelling our history to us so we may know more and sleep better on Christmas night. Perhaps few remember—they certainly don’t talk about it—but $100 million is a lot of people in 2006. Are they sworn to secrecy, too.
It’s just bad timing. But what a way to work and spend yourself into something for next to nothing. There’s no added extra textual element of the movie about secrets forgotten about in the public consciousness—it’s just bad timing. Like Eddie Redmayne’s wife getting thrown out of an airplane, it’s simply bad timing.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter and Instagram: @nickyotissmith