At the very end of Universal’s The Good Shepherd trailer a subtitle appears: The Untold Story About the Birth of the CIA. Well, yeah…I guess. But Robert De Niro‘s spy drama is basically a psychological portrait of a generic workaholic, and the theme is about how an insatiable need for work, earnings, discipline and productivity has a way of eventually separating the workaholic from everything and everyone else. It’s a portrait, in short, of tens of millions of people out there whose marriages are slowly dying on the vine, whose children are growing up alone, whose health is suffering because they eat obsessively and don’t work out enough (if at all). That’s the thread in this film. The late 40s to early ’60s historical CIA stuff (i.e., the particulars about James Jesus Angleton, the real-life spook played in the film by Matt Damon) comes second.