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During his years at Yale and soon after his acceptance into the elite Skull & Bones society, Edward Wilson (Matt Damon) isn’t asked to be a spy, of course, but to be a good citizen in his invitation to gather intelligence for a soon insatiable government. Wilson is a cold, deliberate being obedient only to logic and loyalty, an individual of sparse words and prudent actions – all discretion, no nonsense, and with the emotive range of a paperweight – and thus, the perfect candidate for a career stretching from WWII to the Bay of Pigs.

Damon has no trouble being just as stoic and staid as his trust-no-one lifestyle demands, but having such a detached protagonist makes his arc an unrewarding one for the viewer. Not helping matters is the complete and utter lack of aging of Wilson’s part from his twenties and thirties (perfectly reasonable) to a forty-something father with a grown son. Even minor appearances by Alec Baldwin and Joe Pesci attempt to display the passage of time properly, but Damon stays away from the spray-on gray, and it does hinder matters ever so slightly.

Likewise, Wilson’s loveless marriage of circumstance to Skull & Bones acquaintance Angelina Jolie, offers no heart, but only disdain for his persistently passive nature. Perhaps De Niro was itching to recapture whatever Shark Tale chemistry he felt Jolie brought to her animated role, but she simply gets to throw the occasional tantrum over the fact that the husband she doesn’t love is also the absentee father of their sullen son. Like Billy Crudup in a role as a British ally, she is underused enough (and he, misplaced enough) to be easily substituted for a better performer. Fortunately, proper use is made out of Michael Gambon, William Hurt, and John Turturro in their supporting roles as colleagues of Wilson’s.

De Niro himself makes an occasional appearance himself as a diabetic general that initially calls for the creation of the CIA, and as he loses additional limbs with each arrival, his role serves as a reverse hangman with which to count down reels. Behind the camera, however, he makes every effort to make his world of necks breathed down and shoulders glanced over as nimble as possible, although a choir of children singing “He’s Got The Whole World In His Hands” as Wilson makes a third-act museum rendezvous lacks a certain subtlety.

In the end, De Niro subscribes to the belief of his own character, that the CIA should be “America’s eyes and ears, not its heart and soul,” and his subsequent approach is equivalent to Wilson’s hobby of placing a ship in a bottle: it takes considerate skill and an admirable level of detail to bring such an involved article of history to life, but it only stands to be appreciated from behind a layer of glass. 'Shepherd' becomes a depiction of governments devoured by their own deceptions and an eventual sense of nihilism, a marginally intriguing but ultimately mundane chronicle of the moment when the serpent got the first taste of its own tail.

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originally posted: 12/26/06 18:50:53
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