Product Details

• Actors: Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie, Alec Baldwin, Tammy Blanchard, Billy Crudup
• Directors: Robert De Niro
• Writers: Eric Roth
• Producers: Robert De Niro, James G. Robinson, Jane Rosenthal, Francis Ford Coppola
• Format: AC-3, Dolby, Dubbed, Extra tracks, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
• Language: English (Dolby Digital 5.1), French (Dolby Digital 5.1)
• Subtitles: English, Spanish, French
• Dubbed: French
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 2.40:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: R (Restricted)
• Studio: Universal Studios
• DVD Release Date: April 3, 2007
• Run Time: 168 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (318 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B000MXPE7O
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #26,635 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• Learn more about "The Good Shepherd (Widescreen Edition)" on IMDb

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

A complicated movie about the Central Intelligence Agency and its agents, The Good Shepherd isn't your typical spy movie. Though it stars Matt Damon (The Bourne Identity films) and Angelina Jolie (Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Lara Croft franchise)--actors with considerable experience in the action-espionage genre--The Good Shepherd requires that they play more subdued and (much less interesting) characters here. The movie focuses on the career or Edward Wilson (Damon), a privileged Yale graduate who goes on to help found the CIA. He is a quiet, serious, and guarded man, even in the most intimate moments with his civilian wife (Jolie, in a role that wastes her talent). Set against a backdrop of real-life events such as the Bay of Pigs, The Good Shepherd is meticulous in creating a realistic timeframe. The film gets a jolt of excitement when Robert DeNiro (in his first directing role since 1993's A Bronx Tale) peppers the screen with appearances by Joe Pesci, Alec Baldwin, and William Hurt. But those moments are too infrequent. At 157 minutes long, the film is crammed with many factual details, but the characters are shortchanged when it comes to development. Viewers have to wonder why anyone, much less someone like Wilson who has everything going for him, would devote his life to a thankless job that brings so little happiness to himself and his family. The Good Shepherd is an ambitious but flawed film. The actors do a formidable job with a well-intentioned but meandering script. However, we meet so many characters and learn so little about each that it's difficult to drum up much empathy for any of them. --Jae-Ha Kim

Product Description

Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie and Robert De Niro star in this powerful thriller about the birth of the CIA. Edward Wilson (Damon) believes in America, and will sacrifice everything he loves to protect it. But as one of the covert founders of the CIA, Edward's youthful idealism is slowly eroded by his growing suspicion of the people around him. Everybody has secrets…but will Edward's destroy him? With an all-star cast including Alec Baldwin, Billy Crudup, William Hurt, Timothy Hutton and John Turturro, it's the gripping story David Ansen of Newsweek hails as "spellbinding."

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

236 of 251 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Cold Warrior.... December 23, 2006

By Archmaker VINE™ VOICE

The Good Shepherd is a very very good film that I would be reluctant to recommend to many because despite it having a fictionalized history of the genesis of the CIA as its setting, and its cold look at real spycraft, it is really a very quiet and cerebral character study of the sacrifices one man makes for the sake of his country, and the toll taken not only upon himself but also those around him by the life of duplicity, distrust, compromise and real betrayal that this engenders. I don't know how a 2-1/2 hour movie with so button-downed and taciturn a central character as Matt Damon's Edward Wilson will play in multiplex land, but I give all due credit to Damon for embodying this tightly-wrapped, detached man and Robert DeNiro as director for having the courage to center his film on such a cool and enigmatic protagonist.

Using the 1961 Cuban Bay of Pigs disaster as a framing device, we flashback to 1939 Yale and we see Damon's Edward Wilson as a young Eli soon to be inducted into Skull and Bones where he will join the American WASP elite. I'm glad DeNiro spends a bit of time here as we see Wilson as a brilliant and sensitive young man, seemingly with both heart and humor, with a potential to go in many directions in his life. A telling secret of his life is revealed in his Skull & Bones initiation, and soon, for several reasons, he is singled out for the World War II OSS clandestine service and sent to London, England. But not before impregnating the sister of one of his elite brethern and duly marrying her on the eve of his departure. This marriage will be costly to Edward immediately and eventually to his wife and son as the years progress.

Wartime London intrigue ensues and later postwar Berlin and the beginning of the Cold War.... We watch as Edward not only learns his craft, but we see how he begins to shelve his emotions, tighten his grip on himself and don an impenetrable mask of detached stoicism. Edward Wilson is becoming "serious and humorless" and as he shuts-down only glimpses of the younger man appear. Through these scenes we also meet several key characters in the espionage game that will play important parts throughout the story, not the least being the man who will be Edward's opposite number in the KGB, code named Ulysses. The KGB man tells Edward he is code-named "Mother" and that his propensity for silence is noted and respected. Both men realize their opposite will be formidable and that this will be a very serious and deadly game they are about to play.

Edward returns home post-war to a marriage with a stranger, a son he doesn't relate well to and has little time for, and to the deadly games of the Cold War, dueling with the KGB in proxy wars around the world while coping with moles and betrayal and the internecine wars of bureaucracy. It all comes full circle in ways tragic and sad.

Matt Damon had an incredible challenge playing a man so closed that almost no one knows him. Apparently a composite of several early CIA founders, most notably the brilliant, mole-obsessed James Jesus Angleton, this character is a man that expects betrayal, can trust no one around him and ultimately cannot trust himself in the form of his own emotions. Damon somehow conveys the man's inner anguish without breaking his stern outer resolve. And yet we see flashes, glimpses of the man's regrets, of his lost capacity to love and give of himself.

There are coincidences and some doubtful scenes and situations that Edward particpates in or witnesses that seem a bit contrived but are necessary to broaden the scope of the film, and it is a truncated history by necessity. I can't speak to whether some of the methods and tactics as shown, in particular one interrogation scene, are accurate for the period, and the assertion by a defector that the Soviet Union is bankrupt and hollow rings false for 1961, but overall the mood and tone of the piece seems right. The nonchalance of the privileged elite in assuming leadership roles and the WASP heritage of the OSS and its offspring is presented well and no doubt persists into our world if you think of the Skull & Bones contest of the 2004 Presidential election.

At any rate, I applaud DeNiro and company for taking on such non-General audience material. This is John Le Carre territory, and has much more in common with the Alec Guinness versions of his spy stories as seen in the TV productions of "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" and "Smiley's People", with an equally inscrutable central character, than Bourne or Bond or whatever. This is espionage carried out by a polyglot confusion of often damaged people: patriots, true-believers, careerists, liars, cheats, thieves, sadists and worse--the callous, greedy and corrupt. As one of them says spies are ultimately "romantics" and romantics are ever doomed to disappointment and failure. The DeNiro character (based on Wild Bill Donovan, founder and legend of OSS)says "in the end we're all clerks" or "bootmakers for the King" as another says.

Watching the idealism of Damon's Edward Wilson harden into the ruthless pragmatism of the cool and calculating ultimate bureaucrat was a chilling and worthwhile experience for me. It is a hard, often cruel world we live in, and the world these people inhabit is very hard indeed, and we cannot expect the people we ask to live there not to be somehow affected. Edward's final compromise with himself and his ideals is that he can make no compromise with who he is and what he does. They are now one and the same. Ideals have been replaced by sheer, rigorous efficiency, and conscience by lies within lies and secrets within secrets

The cast supporting Damon (Hurt, Turturro, Baldwin, Crudup, Jolie, Gambon et al)is fine. The production likewise. In an interview DeNiro said that he hopes to continue this story with at least one more film. I hope this one is successful enough that he gets the chance to do so, as I would like to see this story taken forward all the way up to our times. I remember when films like The Spy Who Came In From the Cold or All the President's Men could be hits. I hope this film can find its audience as well, for it is a fine effort. Read more ›

32 of 33 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Masterpiece About Sacrifice August 9, 2007

By Andre 2015

Format:HD DVD|Amazon Verified Purchase

Not the typical spy movie, more a beautifully directed intense psychological drama.
Flashback: The six year old Edward Wilson watches his father prepare to commit suicide, although at that moment the boy doesn't realize it. His father discovers him, sends him away, closes the door and shoots himself. This traumatic experience ironically prepares Edward for a career in the CIA. It will take him around the globe, far away from home, maybe even away from his soul...
Edward (wonderfully portrayed by Matt Damon) is almost unable to show his true feelings. He talks very little, gives up his true love to stay with the woman who will give birth to his son (marvelous: Angelina Jolie).
For all of his life he will sacrifice everything around him to serve his country. It is all he has.
When, after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, he is asked to find the mole in the organization, he begins to realize there is not anyone he can trust, never was. Not his father, not his university teacher, not his so-called friends, not even his super.
There might have been loved ones who could have saved him from all his internal misery: his first love, his wife, his son. But it is too late. He cannot trust and there is betrayal all around. It becomes clear that he never got over that terrible shock when he entered the room and found his father lying dead on the floor.
A wonderful film about fate and the choices we all make, where they lead us and what might have been had we taken another road...
The images are perfect, the actors magnificent, Robert De Niro's directing superb. A very complex must have to watch over and over again.
As to the length of the movie. I just noticed other reviewers had a problem with that. Not me. I never got bored for a second.... I never even got pulled away from the storyline. Sure, it is 2 hours and 40 minutes long, but I didn't realize it until the credits started rolling.
As always (well, almost) the HD DVD's images are brilliant and the combo disc includes 16 minutes of deleted scenes (in HD), picture in picture access. Read more ›

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Le Carré, American Style June 9, 2007

By Scott T. Rivers VINE™ VOICE

Format:DVD

Though not for all tastes, "The Good Shepherd" (2006) is an engrossing spy drama in the John le Carré tradition. Director Robert De Niro gets the most out of his well-cast ensemble, with Matt Damon remarkably effective as the emotionally cold CIA operative and co-founder. Running nearly three hours, the film's leisurely pace works in its favor - chronicling the CIA's evolution from 1939 to the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961. Hopefully, De Niro will continue to explore this fascinating saga in his next directorial project.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars It's missing something December 26, 2007

By Melissa Niksic VINE™ VOICE

Format:DVD

"The Good Shepherd" is an interesting film about Edward Wilson (Matt Damon), a bright young man who graduates from Yale University and goes on to become one of the founding members of the CIA. The movie is set against a variety of important events in U.S. history, which makes the whole government/political aspect of the film very detailed and accurate. However, there's no spark on the emotional side of things. Damon delivers a strong performance as much as the script allows, but his character is a hollow shell of a man who lacks any emotion or feeling, and therefore makes it virtually impossible for the audience to sympathize for him in any way. This movie is almost three hours long, which seems like a lifetime when you haven't developed any sort of attachment to the main character. The supporting cast of the film is very impressive and includes the likes of Angelina Jolie, Joe Pesci, and Robert De Niro (who also directed the film). However, I don't think any of the characters were well-developed enough to allow the actors to display their vast talents, and therefore this film kind of missed its mark for me.