If you felt that what
The Hurt Locker needed was a few belly laughs and more animal comedy,
The Men Who Stare at Goats could be the best film about the War on Terror you see all year. Directed by
Good Night, and Good Luck screenwriter Grant Heslov and based on true events, the old axiom applies: the truth is sometimes stranger than fiction.
Ewan McGregor is Bob Wilton, a reporter on the prowl for his next byline. Bob has just been unceremoniously dumped so it’s a good a time as any, he decides, to set off for war-torn Iraq. By either sheer coincidence or divine providence he crosses paths with the mysterious Lyn Cassady (George Clooney sporting a moustache, a pretty good indication that he’s goofing off). Lyn divulges that he is a member of a U.S. military unit called the New Earth Army – a battalion of ‘warrior monks’ with superpowers. Lyn claims to be able to gather information using mental ‘remote viewing’ techniques and to disperse clouds using the power of his mind. Classic rock helps.
Sensing a story here somewhere, Bob tags along on Lyn’s cross-desert road trip. In flashbacks, we learn (along with Bob) that the New Earth Army was founded by pony-tailed hippie Bill Django (Jeff Bridges in Dude mode) after the U.S. defeat in the Vietnam War. The soldiers learn to shimmy rather than shoot, wield flowers rather than firearms, and are trained in such skills as telepathy, extra-sensory perception and, yes, killing goats by looking deep into their eyes. The unit was shut down in part due to the meddling of renegade psychic Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey) but, with the Iraq conflict raging in the present, Lyn has been reassigned.
The movie is a fictionalised version of the non-fiction book of the same name by journalist Jon Ronson. The structure of the book (it was comprised mainly of Ronson’s interviews) clearly posed a few challenges for screenwriter Peter Straughan. Straughan’s done his darndest to come up with a three-act structure where there wasn’t one and, as such, the film peters out to an unconvincing climax (Straughan had similar troubles hauling the memoir
How to Lose Friends & Alienate People to the big screen).
Still, the movie is so much fun, and the performances so good, that it’s easy to forgive its missteps. There’s something of that classic war satire
Catch-22 in
The Men Who Stare at Goats, that same potent blend of comedy and tragedy, the taste for goofy vignettes and absurd circular logic. As with that novel, one can appreciate
The Men Who Stare At Goats purely on its comic merits. Opposite McGregor’s likeable straight guy, Clooney is at his absolute funniest demonstrating his ‘sparkly-eyes technique’ – and, for my money, doing a lot more acting here than he did in
Up in the Air. The New Earth Army is a hoot, there’s a man with a particular talent involving his genitals, and there are even several examples of that rare phenomena in movies: genuinely funny scenes involving animals (including but not limited to the goat-staring alluded to in the title).
But it would be callous to treat war completely as a laughing matter and, in fact, the public’s need to look on the ‘lighter side’ of war is one of the things the movie interrogates. Even funny moments – consider the real-life use of the
Barney theme song as a means of torture – are chilling for those who are prepared to confront the reality of it all.
The Men Who Stare at Goats opens in Australian cinemas on Thursday, March 4.
You can view The Men Who Stare at Goats movie trailer here on TheVine.