The Good Shepherd

January 8, 2007

The Good Shepherd

WSWS film critic Patrick Martin has a decent political critique of De Niro's CIA flick:

Nowhere in the film does De Niro touch on the principal impact of the CIA internationally: the destruction of hundreds of thousands of lives and the trampling on the democratic rights of (literally) hundreds of millions of people in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America. His Guatemala is a country where the CIA organizes the overthrow of the government without a visible bloodbath. His Congo is an exotic locale for romance and spycraft, not a place of civil war and ruthless struggle for control of vital natural resources.

The only time the camera lingers over the bodies of victims of violence, it is the slain Cuban right-wingers shot down at the abortive Bay of Pigs landing. There are no scenes of mass murder directed and supervised by The Agency, although many such episodes took place during the film’s timeframe—Iran in 1953, Laos, Vietnam, the Philippines—as well as political subversion in Greece, Lebanon, Italy, France, Indonesia, Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic.