The Men Who Stare at Goats Review: Paranormal Futility
The Men Who Stare at Goats opens with a winking title card stating: “More of this is true than you would believe.” My belief is that more of what is true might have made this a better movie.
Based on the nonfiction (yes, nonfiction) book of the same name by British gonzo journalist Jon Ronson and the accompanying 2004 U.K. documentary series, Crazy Rulers of the World, which investigated some of the U.S. military’s more creative ideas to expand its soldiers’ capabilities, the movie recalls classic screwball military satires like Dr. Strangelove and Catch-22.
Brit scribe Peter Straughan takes many of the outlandish yet seemingly true stories and characters from the book but decides to invent the character of Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor), a journalist based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to try to knit some kind of connective story between the Iraq War and the post-Vietnam-era genesis of the U.S. military’s research into the paranormal.
Unfortunately, this overarching story never really works nor amounts to anything, which is a damn shame, because the material is rich and thought-provoking as well as intrinsically humorous.
The screwball comedy begins in the very first scene, when an aged U.S. General Hopgood, played brilliantly staight-up by Stephen Lang (you’ll see him next in Avatar), makes a valiant attempt to run through the concrete wall of his Pentagon office.
The film then cuts to Ewan McGregor’s journalist, on an assignment to interview Gus Lacey (Stephen Root), who claims he has special psychic powers. At first, Wilton is uninterested in the story, having already passed judgment that Lacey is nothing more than an attention-seeking loony. However, Wilton’s ears prick up when Lacey reveals an even crazier story: He was a member of the government’s top-secret unit of “psychic spies.” The most gifted of the group, he is told, was a certain Lyn Cassady.
Having been dumped by his wife for their mutual newspaper editor, Wilton then heads for the Middle East in spring 2003, looking to find a sense of purpose and meaning in a good war story. Problem is, he can’t actually manage to get himself into Iraq. Enviously eavesdropping on the seasoned war reporters telling tales of their exploits at the hotel restaurant in Kuwait City, Wilton serendipitously bumps into “Skip” (Clooney, doing some of his best screwball yet), who initially claims to be an Arkansas salesman but is actually the “Jedi warrior” himself, Lyn Cassady. He has been reactivated and is on a supersecret black-ops mission to Iraq.
Impulsively, Wilton follows the story, and as they bond Wilton soon becomes captivated by Cassady’s tales of the formation of the “New Earth Army,” a Pentagon-funded program that Cassady says was created by disillusioned Vet Bill Django (Jeff Bridges) in the wake of the crushing failure of conventional tactics in Vietnam. In a great flashback scene, Django, replete with goatee and pigtail (and channeling “The Dude”), pitches his proposals to uptight Pentagon brass. Surprisingly, with the military’s confidence at an all-time low and with General Hopgood besieged by paranoia that the Russians have already started a paranormal program of their own, Django is granted his wish to try to train the U.S. military’s first squad of “warrior monks.”
This is the moment in most military films when the ubiquitous training montage occurs. This one is different, however. For in their effort to make the U.S. “the first superpower to have super powers,” Django’s recruits don’t shoot rifles, shine shoes, or navigate assault courses but instead grow their hair long, relearn how to dance, eat 90 percent vegetarian diets, learn to control their heart rates, have out-of-body experiences, walk on fire, and “stop using mindless clichés.” Django believes that in this new dawn of warfare, weapons shall be love, eagle feathers, newly born lambs, and immediate hugs — with a few martial arts moves thrown in for good measure (and to be used only as a last resort). These scenes are tremendously good fun, and the actors involved in them, particularly Clooney, Bridges, and Spacey, all revel in outdoing each other in deadpan delivery.
However, the tranquility of the unit is eventually disrupted by Spacey’s character, Larry Hooper, who, jealous at Cassady’s superior talents and Django’s favoritism towards Cassady, contrives to take control of the program and steer it away from love and towards a darker side, handing Django a dishonorable discharge for LSD use in the process. Once Django has gone, nothing is the same, and Clooney shortly follows his mentor out of the army after the program’s new direction relegates him to staring at goats to try to get their hearts to stop. And while Cassaday does actually achieve the impressive feat, the act has caused irreparable damage to his own heart — if not physically, then at least spiritually.
It is at this point that the plot loses momentum, and as McGregor and Clooney get lost in the Iraqi desert, kidnapped by criminals, and traded to terrorists — then escape, only to get lost again, you start to wonder where this is all going. The director, Grant Heslov, who was a skillful collaborator with Clooney in writing the masterful Good Night, and Good Luck, doesn’t really seem to know either. Thus, he wraps the story up with some heavy-handed allusions to the Abu Ghraib excesses that feel tonally incongruous with the broadness of the rest of the movie, and the film seems to suggest that Wilton has become a believer in the paranormal, even though Django admits to him in the final analysis that it was all a big lie. It’s all interesting and amusing enough, and the actors are fine company for an hour and a half, but overall, for a story that is “more true than you would believe,” the impression it made upon me was disappointingly ephemeral.
(25 votes, average: 2.80 out of 4)
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