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| Category: | Movies | | Genre: | Drama |
Went to see this one with JCh, MelT, LWA and Mirchan.
The movie chronicles about 30 years of the life of a certain Edward Wilson who headed up the CIA after receiving 'training' from the British MI5. This is the pet project of director Robert de Niro and word has it that the character of Edward Wilson is based on the real-life CIA Counterintelligence head James "Jesus" Angleton.
It was a bit confusing for non-history buffs (like me) as there is quite a bit of shuffling in terms of points in time as the movie hops between his youth as a student at Yale, to his early years with the government, then to his time as head of the CIA and everywhere else in between.
Clocking in at almost 3 hrs, this movie is LONG. There were some violent moments, but overall it was slow moving, with a lot of lingering shots on Matt Damon, who plays Edward. I'm not a fan of Matt Damon, but in this movie he was actually quite tolerable to look at -- I think Mirchan and MelT thought that the eyeglasses were offputting, but personally I think the serious role makes him look a bit less like a cad (don't know why but he just has that sort of face that screams "I am a jerk" -- to me anyway). One thing I didn't like was that he wasn't 'aged' properly -- he looked the same when the character was sposed to be 20 and when he was sposed to be 50!
Angelina Jolie plays his wife Clover. Hmm, I still can't see her as a mom....and in most of the movie, she is one. Neither can I see her as an playful younger sister to Edward's best friend John Russell Jr. She also consistently looks older than Edward, even when they first meet while Edward vacationed with her brother John. So I have to say she's miscast. She does look good in most of the movie though.
Overall, I liked the way everything's so detailed, the mystery that all that timeline hopping creates, and the understated way the dialogue plays out. The movie was more about the man than about the CIA and the message in the end, was about the sacrifices he made and the things he gave up.
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