Things don't start off too well for Edward and Clover; soon after their shotgun wedding, he's off to Europe. Their son is born while he's in London, and while some think the war in Europe shouldn't have ended till an invasion of Moscow, Wilson begins his mutually suspicious ties to a KGB operative nicknamed "Ulysses" (Oleg Stefan). The scenes between the CIA and KGB men are some of the movie's better ones, as there's an actual feeling of menace underneath their relatively subdued conversations. Again, though, the movie focuses mostly on Edward and his wife, who has gone back to Margaret when he returns home. There's an awkward homecoming, and things go downhill for the two from there.

The actual conflict between Edward and Margaret—and eventually Edward and his son Edward Jr. (Eddie Redmayne)—is fairly generalized, and some of the scenes play as forced. When the family/career conflict finally comes to a head, forcing Edward to choose between his family and his job (a fact Ulysses blatantly points out, as if it weren't clear enough to begin with), the movie's restrained tone finally gets the best of it. So much happens in the movie's final act, but none of it has an emotional impact. For a study of the cold-blooded nature of the intelligence game, the movie's detached tone works, but it ultimately lessens the impact of Edward's personal dilemma. A scene of Wilson's right-hand man (played by John Turturro) beating a suspect and using LSD as a truth serum certainly have a modern relevance in terms of the use of torture, bringing up questions about Sullivan's warning that the CIA not become the "heart and soul" of America, but the movie's heart is not in its political subtext. As it turns out, the most fascinating scenes in the movie involve the mysteries of the photo and the audio tape, but the implications of final revelation never pay off.

De Niro tells the story with technical precision, and the film does an excellent job evoking its international settings and multi-decade time span. The Good Shepherd is about ten minutes shy of three hours, though, and does it ever feel it. The problem, I suppose, is trying to make a man who bottles up his problems like the tiny ships he builds the least bit interesting.