Defending despair
Matt Damon unswayingly defends the American way despite the corruption and betrayal that surrounds him, while in Letters from Iwo Jima, Japanese troops sell their lives for one more day of freedom. By Declan Burke
Personified by the humourless, dedicated civil servant Edward Wilson (Matt Damon), the CIA as portrayed in Robert De Niro's The Good Shepherd (15A) is a self-subverting, clandestine but ultimately necessary defender of truth, freedom and democracy. The organisation evolves in tandem with Wilson's story: targeted at the outbreak of the second world war as promising spy material and sent to London to look out for America's interests, Wilson rises through the ranks on the backs of betrayed and murdered colleagues until he finds himself implicated in the Bay of Pigs debacle.
Told mostly in extended flashbacks, while CIA technicians work to decipher a tape that will out the mole responsible for America's failure to invade Cuba, it's a worthy, intense piece that deploys familiar tropes from the Le Carré school of spy fiction but invests them with an epic depth and breadth.
Unfortunately, it's a film more to be admired than loved: Damon's performance as a stoic, unswerving defender of the American way, for example, is a perversely moving one despite his total lack of emotion, and yet it's hard to quiet the suspicion that the notoriously wooden actor was typecast for his inability to emote. Angelina Jolie is totally unconvincing as a wholesome, dutiful wife, while far better actors – De Niro, Michael Gambon, William Hurt, John Turturro – engage only peripherally with the story.
The mutually respectful relationship between Wilson and his Russian counterpart, codenamed Ulysses (Oleg Stefan), is perhaps the most interesting aspect of the tale, although the ease with which Ulysses and Wilson associate on various continents is far-fetched. De Niro acquits himself well in terms of investing the epic scope with telling human detail, but he really should have listened to his editor a little more: at 167 minutes, The Good Shepherd is far too long and unwieldy to pack an emotional wallop.
Letters from Iwo Jima (15A), directed by Clint Eastwood as a companion piece to Flags of Our Fathers, is a far more visceral experience, telling the story of the American invasion of Iwo Jima from the Japanese perspective, particularly through the eyes of its commanding officer General Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe) and Private Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya, pictured). Knowing well in advance of the Americans' arrival that they are engaged in a suicide mission, the Japanese soldiers dig in and prepare to sell their lives as dearly as possible in the hope that their sacrifice will delay by even one day the Americans' relentless advance on their homeland.
The barren backdrop and the bleached colours Eastwood deploys excellently convey the soldiers' bleak prospects and their courage in facing impossible odds, but there's more to this than celebrating the myth of Samurai nobility. Individual members of the Japanese forces are every bit as venal and cowardly, defeatist and prone to self-doubt and fear as soldiers have always been; faced with a terrible enemy, and one known not to take prisoners, they in their turn do terrible things. Similar in tone to Sam Peckinpah's Cross of Iron, this is occasionally simplistic but for the most part thought-provoking, not least of all in Japan, where WWII remains something of a taboo subject.
The Good Shepherd ***
Letters from Iwo Jima ***
Also worth seeing this month: Hot Fuzz (15A) a spoof comedy from the makers of Shaun of the Dead; this time the buddy-buddy cop movie gets a well-deserved tickling… The Good German (15A), directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring George Clooney and Cate Blanchett, is a Third Man-style thriller set in post-WWII Berlin… Factory Girl (18s) stars Guy Pearce as Andy Warhol and Sienna Miller as Edie Sedgwick in another spin on Warhol's avant-garde world.