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Keaton is memorable as real-life CIA chief
5th August 2007.This is about Michael Keaton.
But first I want to tell you about the very real James Jesus
Angleton, whom Keaton plays in “The Company.”
I was reading Reed Whittemore’s memoir “Against the Grain: The
Literary Life of a Poet” three months before its publication (it
will be published Oct. 22) and only days after watching all of “The
Company.” I was brought up short by pictures of the real James Jesus
Angleton on page 65.
Whittemore is a poet and critic I’ve always admired. Angleton was
his Yale roommate and the co-editor, with Whittemore, of a literary
magazine called “Furioso.”
The man we’re looking at in the photos doesn’t much resemble a young
version of Michael Keaton. He’s big-eared and has a face that’s wide
at the cheekbones, narrow at the jaw. There’s a suggestion of a
cleft chin in the 1942 portrait of him in uniform.
It was during the war that Angleton joined the OSS and became the
code-named “mother” of the modern CIA, while Buffalo-raised General
“Wild Bill” Donovan became its “father.”
The man we’re looking at is a self-confident Yale aesthete who’d
grown up in Italy (his father was an executive at National Cash
Register), and known poet Ezra Pound there. Picture a Yale
undergraduate who, as Whittemore says, wore expensive Italian suits
and maneuvered through the major poets of his time “with an English
accent and a lofty manner that complimented his Italian suits.”
“He was a fine mystery man” writes Whittemore 65 years later of the
student Angleton. “Mystery became him and was to do so even more,
rising, rising in the CIA, until controversy brought him down.”
Michael Keaton? Michael Keaton?
Thereby hangs a tale.
Here’s a brief overview of “The Company:” tonight’s first
installment is almost mercilessly dull — “Masterpiece Theater” by
other means. It mostly answers one question: “Whatever happened to
Rory Cochrane after he walked out of ‘C.S.I. Miami?’ ” (Cochrane, by
the way, will reputedly be back next season, somewhat incredibly.)
But this, I assure you, is not your average TNT epic about the CIA.
Next Sunday’s installment — about the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 and
the Bay of Pigs disaster — is much better. By the time you get to
the miniseries’ third and final night — Aug. 19 — something truly
astounding has happened. It becomes absolutely riveting, as good as
anything I’ve seen on TV all year. |
