The Good Shepherd, directed by Robert De Niro and written by Eric Roth, really doesn’t play by the usual spy movie rules. Forget the fast-paced fights and car chases you’d get with Jason Bourne. This movie moves with a cold, measured chill, almost clinical. It digs into the early days of the CIA, charting a path from 1939 to 1961, and centers on Edward Wilson, a guy so bottled up, you sometimes wonder if there’s anything left alive inside him. Matt Damon gives him this strange, haunted presence. His experience in Yale’s Skull and Bones and the grit from surviving WWII carve away whatever warmth he once had. Watching him change from a sensitive, poetry-reading student to a hardened counter-intelligence officer, you start to see the birth of America’s old-boy, secret society elite, where loyalty to the club comes before honesty to the country. Wilson doesn’t just fit into this world, he’s completely swallowed by it. The heart of the story is the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, a botched atte...