The Spy who stayed out in the cold

Reviewed - The Good Shepherd: "IT'S a dirty business," a Yale professor (Michael Gambon) warns his student (Matt Damon) in The Good Shepherd. "Get out of it while you can, while you still have a soul." That dirty business is espionage, and the Damon's character is modelled on James Jesus Angelton, one of the founders of the CIA.

In The Good Shepherd's time-shifting structure, the story begins in April 1961, the month of the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion, when US-backed Cuban exiles attempted to overthrow Fidel Castro. It transpires, however, that we are coming to the end of the story, although there is quite some way to go. Damon's Edward Wilson receives a blurred photograph and an indistinct audiotape of a couple having sex. While that material is investigated for clues, the movie embarks on the first of its multiple flashbacks into Wilson's past, revisiting a traumatic incident in his childhood.

As a poetry student working on his thesis at Yale in 1939, Wilson is initiated into the secret Skull and Bones society, with its arcane, oddly homoerotic and campy rituals. Its members are "the very best in America", one proudly boasts, including US presidents and captains of industry. In fact, they have included President George W Bush and his father, who once headed the CIA.

Gen Bill Sullivan (Robert De Niro) draws on the secret society's upper-class membership - all male, all white - as a prime recruitment source for the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), the precursor of the CIA. One is the taciturn, idealistic Wilson, who marries a senator's daughter (Angelina Jolie) and then spends six years in Europe during the war encountering, among others, a British spy (Billy Crudup) based on Kim Philby. Wilson returns home to what becomes known as the Cold War.

The film is as cold as Wilson himself. Screenwriter Eric Roth skilfully juggles the parallel narratives - the flashbacks following Wilson from his Yale years onwards, and the meticulous examination of the audiotape and photograph in the early 1960s - until both strands neatly, satisfyingly converge.

Although over-extended at close on three hours, The Good Shepherd represents a highly ambitious undertaking for Roth and for De Niro, who returns to the director's chair for the first time since his debut with A Bronx Tale (1993), and it persuasively establishes a sinister atmosphere of paranoia and betrayal.

Ultimately director and writer overreach themselves, stalling the movie with a surfeit of information and draining it of vitality, and those lapses render it more memorable for striking individual sequences than as a whole.

Some of the movie's many characters seem superfluous, most gratingly one played by Joe Pesci, more mannered than ever, and Jolie's underdeveloped stock role as a neglected wife.

De Niro throws juicier bones the way of other fellow thespians - notably Gambon, John Turturro, William Hurt and Martina Gedeck - who gnaw on them with relish and conviction. And he introduces an impressive discovery in Eddie Redmayne, a young English actor perfectly cast as Wilson's sad-eyed, grown-up son.

At The Good Shepherd's core is Damon, who gives a driven, impassive performance in yet another role that stretches him dramatically, and he rises to the challenge.