Edward Wilson (Damon), is an earnest poetry student at Yale in the late 1930s when he joins the ultrasecret society Skull & Bones. This club has connections that lead to his recruitment to the Office of Strategic Services, a secret government espionage agency that's the forerunner to the CIA.
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Although a secretive, diffident guy, Edward attracts the attention of Margaret Russell (Jolie), nicknamed "Clover," the sister of a wealthy classmate. Edward has been seeing a lovely deaf girl named Laura (Tammy Blanchard), but a roll in the grass with Clover at a party results in her getting pregnant and Edward marries her. War is declared and Edward is whisked off to service in England for the duration. As a result, he comes home a stranger to his wife and five-year-old son Edward Jr. after the war.
The Cold War takes up the rest of his career, culminating in the abortive Bay of Pigs invastion of Cuba in April 1961. Edward searches for the answers to why the invasion failed -- not least because somebody's head will roll -- at the same time as he has his technical experts try to decipher a shady photograph of a couple in bed and a tape recording of some of their conversation which was left anonymously for him to find.
Edward Junior follows his father's footsteps into the CIA. Edward meets his old deaf girlfriend again, and his wife moves out to Arizona. The Cold War, a longtime Russian counterpart he first met in Berlin in 1945, his British spy colleagues, and his unhappy family life will all come to a collision with the answers to his questions about the Bay of Pigs, the photo, and the tape recording. This 2006 film was a ten-year "pet project" of director Robert De Niro, who appears in a cameo as the CIA founder, General Bill Sullivan.
The review of this Movie prepared by David Loftus