The good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep

The Good Shepherd, a chilly film about a spy trapped in the cold of his own heart, who seeks to put a tragic human face on the Central Intelligence Agency, namely that of Matt Damon. The story more or less begins and ends at the Bay of Pigs. In between there is a spicy, lively interlude in the 1930's at Yale University, where little boys are made of skull and bones and secret societies. Yale leads to World War II, cloak and dagger and a British spy cut from the same bespoke cloth as Kim Philby. Then it's over to Washington, where the citadels of power loom against the cheerless sky like tombstones.

Damon excels at secretive men, and few are as mysterious as Edward Wilson, the spy catcher in The Good Shepherd.

Though a composite, Wilson seems largely based on the fascinating, freakishly paranoid James Jesus Angleton, a Yale graduate and poetry lover who served in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II and ran CIA counterintelligence from 1954 to 1974. Angleton cultivated orchids; Wilson builds the more prosaically symbolic miniature ships in bottles.

Angleton is now widely thought to have hurt the CIA more than he helped it, and articles on the agency's Web site (cia.gov) frame his tenure in generally unfavorable terms (it had "devastating results," for one). Written by Eric Roth and directed by Robert De Niro, The Good Shepherd doesn't address the full consequences of that devastation, partly because it wants to take on the institution as well as the man, and partly, one imagines, because Angleton's crippling paranoia would have been too difficult to shape into a neat narrative. The Good Shepherd is an origin story about the CIA, and for the filmmakers that story boils down to fathers who fail their sons, a suspect metaphor that here becomes all too ploddingly literal.

Certainly fathers and sons offer a serviceable alternative to martinis and Aston Martins. Created in 1947, the CIA has been responsible for many deeds, including our abiding fascination with spooks. No matter which way public sentiment shifts about the agency and its handiwork (Chile, Nicaragua), we remain fascinated with spies, or at least an idea of them, an idea in which matchbox cameras and microphones invariably figure more prominently than kilometers of locked filing cabinets. Secrets make agencies like the CIA sexy, no matter how rumpled the raincoats. The most interesting thing about The Good Shepherd is how hard the filmmakers work not only to demystify the agency, but also to strip it of its allure, its heat.

In Betrayal, a book about Aldrich Ames, the double agent who for years ferried CIA secrets to the Soviets, the agency is characterized as "a cross between Yale's secret Skull and Bones society and the post office." In its basic outline Roth's overly busy screenplay takes the same approach to the agency as it follows Wilson's journey through institutions of power. At Yale he joins the Skull and Bones, where the power elite helps reproduce itself by bonding and dressing like the orgiastic partygoers in Eyes Wide Shut. The all-male members of this clandestine group don't have sex with one another, at least on screen, but they do mud-wrestle naked, a ritual that underscores the homosocial nature of Wilson's world.

Yale and World War II are the juiciest bits of the story, partly because they involve the charismatic Dr. Fredericks, played by a superb Michael Gambon. A Yale professor with a leer as insinuating as his walking stick, Fredericks tries to seduce Wilson into some antidemocratic chicanery through their shared love of poetry. (At Yale, Angleton helped found a poetry magazine in which he published Ezra Pound, a family acquaintance.) This attempted seduction parallels a rather more comical one involving Angelina Jolie, who plays Margaret Russell, the sister of another Yale student. With her poppy-red lipstick and raucously aggressive sexuality, Margaret proves a far more successful seducer than Fredericks, as female pulchritude and power triumph over manly poetry and secrets.