Ah, but not for long. This is a man's world, after all, filled with specters skulking through alleys with blood on their hands and the world on their shoulders. Conscripted into the OSS, Wilson travels to London, where he apprentices in espionage and intelligence and meets Arch Cummings (Billy Crudup), a fop with a posh accent patterned on Kim Philby. The film shies away from the more provocative aspects of Angleton's long acquaintance with Philby, and the years they lunched together while Philby worked for the Soviets. Whatever its true nature, the friendship hurt Angleton's marriage, as he later admitted: "Once I met Philby, the world of intelligence that had once interested me consumed me. The home life that had seemed so important faded in importance."
That spells trouble for Jolie, alas, who after her spectacular entrance has to spend most of the film as the aggrieved, abandoned wife. It is not a good fit. A force of nature, Jolie reads more believably when she's running through the jungle in boots and a bikini, as she does in the Tomb Raider flicks, than when standing on the sidelines in a domestic nightmare. But stand and screech and gamely slosh the booze she does while Damon's spy helps win the war and later helps turn the CIA into a shadow empire with some dependable character actors: De Niro as one of the agency's founders, the dependably great Alec Baldwin as an FBI agent and an equally fine William Hurt as the pipe-smoking head of the CIA.
De Niro does fine in his avuncular role and, in the main, even better as the film's director. He imbues The Good Shepherd with a funereal vibe that works especially well on the dark, dank streets of London, where Wilson learns his first repellent lesson in spy-catching, and during his early years in Washington. Among the film's most striking visual tropes is the image of Wilson simply going to work in the capital alongside other similarly dressed men, a spectral army clutching briefcases and silently marching to uncertain victory. In silhouette the men recall the gangsters in a Jean-Pierre Melville film, even as their anonymity evokes the drones in Madeleine L'Engle's book A Wrinkle in Time who are ruled by an evil disembodied brain called IT.
Who rules the drones in The Good Shepherd? Who is IT? The president, the people, American mining and banana companies, the ghosts of fathers past, the agency itself? The answer is hard to know.
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