The Men Who Stare at Goats

At the very beginning, we're informed by a title card that the movie we're about to see is based more on fact than we'd like to believe. I have not read the novel by Jon Ronson, which investigated reports that the military was investigating using telepathy and psychic phenomenon as tools of war, but I have huge doubts that The Men Who Stare at Goats has much if anything to do with what was on the written page. Oh, I have no disbelief that such a program could have existed within the military at one point. As for the movie, it looks to me like it was an excuse for a lot of big-name highly paid actors to be goofy and have a lot of fun.

The question becomes, does that fun carry over to the audience? For the most part, yes. This is a light, breezy and often entertaining film that has a lot of offbeat charm. I was glad for that charm, because if the movie had to rely solely on its plot, it wouldn't have gotten very far. The story kicks off with a small town journalist named Bob Wilson (Ewan McGregor), who leaves to cover the war in Iraq in order to forget about some personal pain back home when his wife leaves him. He becomes stranded in Kuwait while trying to enter country, and while killing time in a hotel, he meets a man named Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), who claims to be a member of an elite psychic military squad that has been called back into action for the war. Bob is skeptical, but senses a great story in Lyn, so he decides to follow him into Iraq on his "secret mission".

From this point, the screenplay by Peter Straughan (How to Lose Friends and Alienate People) basically takes a loose back and forth quality. It constantly cuts back and forth between Bob and Lyn's various misadventures in the desert, and flashbacks that tell us how the military began training psychic warriors, or "Jedis" as Lyn calls himself. The flashbacks tell of a man named Bill Django (Jeff Bridges, basically giving the same performance he gave in The Big Lebowski), who spent seven years living in a hippie culture after his tour in Vietnam. The experience changed him, and he presented an idea to his military superiors of a unit of "warrior monks", who would fight with their minds instead of their weapons, and spread peace, love and understanding. Lyn became one of the star soldiers in the "New Earth Army", as it came to be known, until one of the other soldiers named Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey) became jealous of Lyn's abilities, and started thinking of ways that he could take control of the unit by getting rid of Bill, and start leading his fellow psychic soldiers down the path of the dark side.

This is where the title comes from. After Larry took over, Lyn was forced into an experiment to see if they could kill their enemies with their minds. They experimented on goats, forcing Lyn to stare at it until the animal dropped dead from Lyn's psychic suggestions. Lyn hated using his powers to kill and left the force, but believes that the New Earth Army is still active, and still killing goats to test their psychic powers in the ways of violence. Up to this point, The Men Who Stare at Goats has been playing up the absurdity of the whole situation quite well. First-time director Grant Heslov (who co-wrote Good Night and Good Luck with Clooney, as well as produced Leatherheads) finds the right tone by mixing fact with off the wall, Coen Brothers-style humor. Since Clooney himself is a veteran of more than a few Coen comedies, he pulls it off effortlessly, making Lyn into a charming oddball. We can understand why Bob is drawn to him and wants to follow him. The movie has a lot of fun with Clooney and McGregor discussing the idea of "Jedi Warriors", and what it means to be one. McGregor, obviously, played Obi-Wan in the Star Wars prequels, and I don't know if they had cast him in advance or if it was pure dumb luck, but having Clooney teaching him how to be a Jedi made me smile.

It's when the plot truly takes over that the movie starts to spin its wheels. You can pinpoint when the movie starts to go downhill, and it's when Spacey's character leaves the flashbacks, and actually enters the main plot. Not that he's bad in the role mind you, it's just that the movie itself loses its breezy sense of lunacy, and becomes bogged down with too much plot. Given everything that came before, the movie didn't need all of it. The last half becomes too structured, when it was the insanity that was giving the movie its charm. Was it studio interference? Was it just the screenwriter losing confidence in his own work? I can't really say. All I can say is that I was disappointed. A movie where a military general tells his superiors that the Soviets are doing psychic experiments because they mistakenly believe the U.S. is doing them, so now they have to start doing it to catch up with the Soviets does not need the climax that the movie gives us.

If there's a real fault to be found it's that the movie, enjoyable as it is, doesn't leave much of an impression. It's likely to be forgotten as soon as you walk out the theater door. Still, while you're watching it, The Men Who Stare at Goats is a lot of fun, if not a little ambitious. Just don't expect much more than that.

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