The Good Shepherd (Robert De Niro): Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie, Alec Baldwin, Michael Gambon, Robert De Niro, William Hurt.

Running time: 167 minutes.
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ROBERT De Niro, the actor famed for intense, po-faced and earnest performances, has for his second film directed a near-three-hour espionage drama that is intense, po-faced and earnest. The Good Shepherd is an epic tale about the birth of the CIA and as an actor De Niro plays only a bit part. But his presence looms large. You can see it all over Matt Damon's impassive but terrific performance as Edward Wilson, a Faustian intelligence operative who rises to the top of post-WWII US spy games but who loses his scruples and everything dear to him in the process. Damon's Wilson is an unlikely spy . . . a stiff, reticent Yale intellectual. But his sense of decency becomes slowly warped by a skewed sense of patriotic duty.

We first meet him in 1961 after the Bay of Pigs, the CIA's bungled invasion of Cuba. He is a senior member of CIA counter-intelligence and he is trying to decipher voices on a recording that may lead to a double agent. The story then threads back and forth from this puzzle through formative parts of his life . . . an arc that takes in anti-Nazi propaganda during the war to the more sinister mind games of the Cold War. In 1939, Wilson is a high achiever at Yale and, like his father before him, joins the Skull and Bones club (a real-life fraternity that targets the brightest and best white anglosaxon men, many of whom become leaders of politics and commerce).

From a young age, Wilson had instilled in him a deep-felt sense of duty. That duty would underpin all his decisions, including leaving his deaf girlfriend Laura (Tammy Blanchard) to marry Clover (Angelina Jolie) when he makes her pregnant. Later, he emotionally abandons Clover and their son in the interests of patriotic national security . . . a point in the film when Damon's moppet features disrupt our belief in his aging character and he looks more like a brother than a father to his teenage son.

But Damon attacks the role with an almost pathologial lack of emotion . . . a mandarin whose paranoid patriotism ultimately destroys his personal life. The wider parable is that this kind of dedication to duty cost America too . . . a country of noble intent after the second world war, it became poisoned by Cold War paranoia and a self-justified and murderous methodology.

"You are the ones that make the big wars, " Joe Peschi's aging gangster tells Wilson at one point. "No, we're the guys who make sure they're small, " he responds.

Eric Roth, the writer behind Steven Spielberg's similarly spook-themed Munich, has crafted an intelligent, satisfying slow-burn movie. De Niro's direction is economical . . . at just under three hours it never drags and its pointed messages are delicately stated.

But while the film debunks the myth of the CIA as glamorous, gun-toting cowboys . . . instead, they're seen almost as grey pen pushers, pursuing world security with a dubious but clinical exactitude . . . this faithfulness to history robs it of a much-needed air of danger. Espionage here is less cloak and dagger than a huge game of international chess . . . a battle of wits against a steely but distant Russian nerve.