Robert De Niro directs. I would only have to say this to sell you the film, but the word count dictates I write more. So, on with the review. In 1961, after a blundered CIA operation agent Edward Wilson (Matt Damon) recalls his service with the Agency, and his failed marriage to Clover (Angelina Jolie). Cutting to 1939, he’s a clean cut literary scholar and member of Yale’s secret society, Skull and Bones, for America's future governing class. From this world he is recruited into the prototype CIA, graduating from the elitist secrecy of college to the power games of WWII. A younger filmmaker would have over glossed this ambitious project with all the trappings of copious amounts of red lipstick and raincoats, but De Niro’s maturity results in a slower, more considered piece. The movie unfolds much like a novel, where power games are played out by poets and dreamers.

Damon commands the camera with a passionately silent performance. A brief romance with a hearing-impaired woman (Tammy Blanchard) is ruined when Edward gets Angelina Jolie pregnant, who is captivating as a woman living in a sham marriage. Her beauty should be jarring in this film, a celebrity pasted into the drama, but instead she takes on a tragic elegance that’s human and almost gawky. Astonishingly in a film riddled with ‘big names’ from the scene- stealing Michael Gambon to De Niro himself, no egos are flattered and cinematography allows us to count the pock marks on the characters’ faces.

If you require a film to sledge hammer you into suspense than this is not for you, especially at a fragmented and self-conscious 167 minutes long. It still succeeds with stunning moments of tenderness. In one scene when Edward and the deaf Laura dance in a club he mouths to her the lyrics of a song she cannot hear. In another scene a conflicted Edward on a crackly telephone line, far from his family with the sounds of a blitzed London overhead, desperately asks what colour his newborn son’s eyes are. These scenes are so fraught with regret and remorse in a way only a director with life experience of 63 years could provide, completing a complex and stylish film.

Sarah Woolley

Four Stars

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