One of the worst movies I ever painfully suffered through is called The Remains of the Day [1]. This is an extremely long (approximately 3.5 days in perceptual time) period piece directed by the master of such instruments of torture [2]. The basic filmmaking strategy here consists in focusing on a man who has trouble expressing emotion and proves it by sticking to pretty much one facial expression and tone of voice. The filmmaker ensures that this guy's head fills up a good part of the frame for most of the movie. I don't know why this technique isn't used more often.

The Good Shepherd [3] employs an entirely different technique: instead of Anthony Hopkins vacantly staring into the middle distance, mouth hanging halfway open, we get a tightlipped, stony faced Matt Damon. And in case the less experienced actor stumbles and allows a modicum of expression to animate his eyeballs and the surrounding musculature, he is outfitted with McGoo-style glasses to obscure any lapses in paralysis.

Damon's character probably has fewer than a hundred lines in the nearly three-hour film. As his Russian counterpart observes when trying to hold a conversation with him, The silence is deafening. Two or three of these lines, moreover, are eye-rollingly absurd, and jolt the viewer out of the world of the movie, just as he was beginning to accept it on its own terms, into the world of Was that supposed to be a joke? Why am I watching this? These moments (unfortunately some of the most memorable in the film) occur when the script, having patiently established the central character as a super-competent man of extreme seriousness, squanders it all by placing an absurdly explicit political statement in his mouth. What I mean by political is the use of dialogue to express the author's opinion about the type of person represented by the character rather than something the character might actually say. These are the kind of lines that make me wonder how any actor could deliver them without embarrassment.

The script's flaws are not limited to silly dialogue: the central plot twist just makes no sense (it involves someone revealing a bit of secret information to a lover-spy for no particular reason, as the person in question is apparently supposed to be neither an idiot nor a traitor, but must act as both in the service of the plot).

It's easy to summon contempt for the director, Robert De Niro, because of his depressing compulsion to prostitute his talent in recent years, in everything from light comedies for idiots [4] to the most cynical species of television advertising. And this contempt would make it satisfying to turn the movie's tedium and (not the good kind of) absurdity into a round dismissal. But the more complicated truth is that, despite all its flagrant deficiencies, the movie somehow held my attention, which is something of an accomplishment, considering its length and pacing.

Part of the attraction derives from the atmosphere of tension and paranoia that the director manages to keep going through the whole ride. In some scenes there is a method to the leading man's reticence: conversations with his Russian counterpart in which significant silences convey specific intent but allow deniability to be maintained. Words, objects, the lack of words, gestures, each can have a double or triple meaning, and these scenes are handled deftly and with subtlety. There are also a couple of genuinely funny moments: one with an excellent Joe Pesci as a mafioso whom the spooks pressure into helping with their Cuba problem; another marking the appearance of a superb John Turturro as the leading man's assistant. In this scene the film seems to be flirting with some gentle self-mockery, and almost makes one wonder if some of the egregious bits of dialogue might be tongue-in-cheek.

The real story that the filmmakers want to tell is how a life of high-level intrigue and secrecy corrodes the central character's soul and demolishes his family life. But it would certainly be possible for someone who was less of a prick to do his job and behave decently toward his wife and son.

So there it is: long, silly, tedious, well-acted, engaging, and ultimately rather provocative. I was provoked to take away an overall political point, perhaps not intended: that the US's string of foreign policy and intelligence failures that followed WWII were partly due to the CIA being placed under the control of Skull and Bones twits rather than serious and competent people.