Poor Little Buttercup

In The In-Laws, the uproarious 1979 comedy, dentist Alan Arkin spots a photograph of John F. Kennedy on the office wall of rogue CIA agent Peter Falk with a handwritten message: “To Vince: At least we tried. Best, Jack.”

“What did that inscription mean?” Arkin asks.

“The Bay of Pigs,” says Falk. “That referred to the Bay of Pigs.”

“You were involved in the Bay of Pigs?” says Arkin.

“Involved?” says Falk. “That was my idea!”

“The Bay of Pigs,” Arkin replies.

“You win some, you lose some,” shrugs Falk.

Peter Falk’s character is a complete lunatic–he claims to have seen tse-tse flies the size of eagles carrying Guate malan babies off to their doom in their beaks–but at least he is decent com pany. That’s more than you can say for Edward Wilson, Matt Damon’s character in The Good Shepherd. Wilson, too, is credited in this movie with the Bay of Pigs scheme. And in another eerie parallel with The In-Laws, Wilson lets loose a bunch of locusts on the Guatemalan tobacco crop (although, unlike the tse-tse flies in The In-Laws, the locusts in The Good Shepherd are not “protected against pilferage under the provisions of the Guacamole Act of 1917”).

The screenwriter of The Good Shepherd, Eric Roth, had an idea. His idea was that the CIA’s obsession with secrecy is the result of the repressions visited upon impressionable young White Anglo Saxon Protestants like Wilson, whom we follow from his college days in the late ’30s until the early 1960s.

Like all WASPs, according to Roth, Wilson has no idea what real fun is. He spends his entire life scowling. Even when he’s dressed in drag as a Yale student in 1939 singing “Poor Little Buttercup” with the Whiffenpoofs, he looks like he swallowed a lemon. He spends his free time putting miniature boats inside bottles instead of romping in the sack with his wife, who happens to be Angelina Jolie.

Not that he goes another way or anything. When he joins a secret society at Yale, he doesn’t enjoy rolling around in the mud naked with his fellow Skull and Bones guys, either. He just doesn’t want to roll in the hay with his wife–a wife who looks and sounds just like Angelina Jolie. Have you ever seen Angelina Jolie? That WASP repression is certainly a powerful force.

Wilson is recruited out of Yale to join the fledgling Office of Strategic Services. This offer comes at a very good time, because he has just gotten married to Angelina Jolie and if he stayed he might have to share a bed with her, and who could possibly want that? He goes abroad for the entirety of World War II, and when he returns home to Washington he has a five year-old son who doesn’t know him and is afraid of him, and he has a new intelligence agency to start.

That new intelligence agency is entirely unnecessary, as we learn later when Wilson has a Soviet defector tortured and drugged with truth serum. Unable to speak falsehoods, the defector informs Wilson that the Soviets pose no threat, that nothing works inside the Soviet Union, and that the only reason for the Cold War is the enrichment of the military-industrial complex. This revelation of the Soviet Union’s harmlessness occurs, by the way, at some point in the 1950s–you know, around the time the Soviets exploded a nuclear device and crushed the Hungarian rebellion and helped Fidel Castro to take over an island 90 miles off America’s shore.

You know those WASPs; they can’t show any love to Angelina Jolie, but give them a little glimpse of a pointless but expensive weapons system and they get all weak in the knees. And they may be completely inexpressive, but if they meet a Jew you can be sure they’re going to say something anti-Semitic. Wilson goes to Miami to see a Jewish gangster who isn’t named Meyer Lansky but might as well be. He may be a crook, but at least he worries about his grandchildren getting a sunburn, which is more than you can say for Wilson and his son. He asks Wilson why he behaves the way he does, and Wilson replies, “It’s our country, and the rest of you are visiting.”

The Good Shepherd isn’t exactly a bad movie. It’s extremely well acted, as you might expect from a film directed by Robert De Niro. And despite its dogmatically leftist assault on the idea that the United States has ever had anything to defend itself from, it does manage to convey the head-spinning complexities of a life devoted to spying and counter-spying and counter-counter-spying. It holds your attention for more than two-and-a-half hours, and that’s saying something.

But it’s undone by its central premise. The character of Edward Wilson is based on James Angleton, the CIA counterintelligence chief. But whatever Angleton may have been–and I incline toward the view that he became so haunted by the “wilderness of mirrors” in which he found himself trapped that he ended up as something perilously close to a paranoid schizophrenic–he certainly wasn’t a dullard. He was a brilliant man who was both gifted and cursed by a chess player’s mind capable of perceiving a million different permutations resulting from any single action. If he had been colorless and dull and easily gulled, like Edward Wilson, he wouldn’t have turned the CIA upside down in the 1960s in pursuit of a high-ranking Soviet agent who almost certainly never existed–and he wouldn’t have become an object of fascination for CIA-obsessed writers on both the right and left for many decades.

The captivating and haunting mystery of James Angleton goes unexplored in the portrait of Edward Wilson offered by Eric Roth and Robert De Niro. He’s simply a quiet nightmare vision of the WASP ascendancy as imagined by an Oscar-winning Jewish screenwriter and an Oscar-winning Italian-American actor-director.

The movie ends with Wilson walking down a lonely corridor to the strains of “Poor Little Buttercup.” It would have been better if it had ended with a voiceover of Peter Falk in The In-Laws telling a New York cabbie about the glories of the CIA: “Are you interested in joining? The benefits are fantastic. The trick is not to get killed. That’s the key to the benefit program.”

John Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.