Weekend DVDs.

At the time of its release, reviewers of the theatrical version of The Good Shepherd didn't show much love. The film scored a mere 56 percent approval rating at Rotten Tomatoes and among the more disparaging comments are Jon Popick's of Planet Sick-Boy ("a cinematic still-birth") and Rolling Stone's Peter Travers: "It's tough to slog through a movie that has no pulse." There appears to be no sentimentality left for Robert De Niro, here making his second foray into directing.

One can see their point. It is a long movie (167 minutes), and Eric Roth's ambitious script necessarily spans decades to tell its story. And the subject matter - an alternative history of the CIA - seemed an unlikely fit for a man whose first directorial effort was a gritty tale set in the streets and gutters of an ethnic enclave. Anyway, most everyday viewers probably mixed it up with The Good German.

Still, The Good Shepherd had much to recommend it. Few movies these days attempt its scope, or if they do, they rarely manage to make sense over the long haul. The film has a terrific cast, from Matt Damon, as a stand-in for CIA executive James Jesus Angleton, here playing a sort of anti-Bourne, through Angelina Jolie (whom the viewer keeps thinking must be a femme fatale; she isn't), Alec Baldwin (a current king of cameos), Billy Crudup as Kim Philby, De Niro himself, Keir Dullea, Michael Gambon, William Hurt, John Turturro, Timothy Hutton, and all the way down to Joe Pesci, in a small part as a gangster.

In fact, Pesci's character supplies something of a key to the film. The Good Shepherd's alternative account of the CIA's international interventions shows the organization as one utterly breached and rife with continual failure (yet, as one character comments, in the end, the US still "beat" the USSR). Viewers may have been unsettled by a big, expensive movie that essentially told the audience that one of their major institutions was a total failure, with a central "hero" who was more withdrawn than Rain Man. At one point (chapter 15 on the disc), in a marvelously chilling scene that completely redefines the spectator's view of him, Matt Damon's Edward Bell Wilson is talking to Pesci's Joseph Palmi, and the Italian gangster asks Wilson what his social class has as a defining characteristic, in contrast to the Italians with their church and family and African-Americans with their music (in Palmi's terms). Wilson replies, "The United States of America: The rest of you are just visiting." Suddenly you see that Wilson is not a nice guy, but an ideologue and a demagogue, tromping on civil rights in defense of his presumptive ownership of America.

So, might the DVD reviews of the film be better, given that the writers have more time to reflect and replay? The anonymous reviewer at Current Film finds the movie's narrative "only occasionally" interesting, though the film's visuals "are exceptional, with gorgeous cinematography... Still, despite superb visuals and some memorable supporting performances, Good Shepherd never manages enough momentum and the story isn't as compelling as the story of the early days of the CIA had the potential to be."

The acronymal JJB at the DVD Journal, however, is much more sympathetic, noting that the film "attempts to put a human face on the early years of the CIA, even if the faces we meet are more compromised than noble." The writer also clarifies the film's intentions: "The Good Shepherd takes a dim view of US intelligence activities from 1946 to 1961, although it doesn't play as an anti-American screed or cautionary tale. There's no mistaking the all-white, insular Ivy League elite that founded America's spy community, but at no point does the story seem to suggest that a foreign intelligence service isn't vital to the nation's security, or that America isn't worth the fight. Instead, the intrigue plays out with the subtlety of a John le Carré novel, where the compromises are not necessarily the product of moral defects, but instead the inherent, inescapable result of all covert operations, large and small."

Meanwhile, Phil Bacharach at DVD Talk is even more enthusiastic. Matt Damon gives a "tour de force performance... His Edward Wilson is a tragic figure who sacrifices personal happiness for the demands of a job that precludes trust and intimacy. Damon conveys fierce intelligence, but it is edged with melancholy, too; you know that he realizes exactly the magnitude of what he has denied himself. That subtlety is no small feat in a movie that faces the age-old conundrum of how to tell the story about cold detachment without becoming coldly detached along the way."

Incidentally, the disc, from Universal, comes with an excellent transfer and, for supplements, only a 16-minute collection of seven deleted scenes that comprise a subplot about Angelina Jolie's brother (Gabriel Macht), also a spy and, furthermore, a traitor. The sequence also alludes to the hints of incest suggested in the original film.

At Marathonpacks: A video-by-video breakdown of the R.E.M. DVD When the Light is Mine: The Best of the IRS Years 82 - 87.

"A creeping editing motif grows through Alain Resnais's Muriel, or the Time of Return, a kind of pre-split screen simultaneity: we catch glimpses, sometimes for only a shot, sometimes across several, of what other people are doing while we are watching the central story of the film." Daniel Kasman elaborates.

Steve Erickson on Early Bergman: "The packaging is rather bare-bones - its only bonus feature is a page of well-written liner notes accompanying each disc - but this austerity suits the films."

Annie Wagner reviews Gavin Lambert's Another Sky for the Stranger.

Michael Blowhard ho-hums over François Ozon's 5x2 and suggests, "Why not catch up with Water Drops on Burning Rocks instead? Now there's a pansexual chamber dramedy with a frisky and absurdist kick."

Peter Sobczynski has a walloping DVD roundup at Hollywood Bitchslap; Movie City News has another.

Posted by dwhudson at April 7, 2007 10:07 AM