Don’t Linger On The Men Who Stare At Goats

I’ll be honest here: I’m a much bigger fan of the Michael Clayton, Three Kings, Ocean’s Eleven (but not the sequels), Syriana, Good Night, and Good Luck George Clooney than I am of the Oh Brother Where Art Thou?, Intolerable Cruelty, Burn After Reading, and now The Men Who Stare At Goats George Clooney. I like the suave but haunted, sarcastic but romantic George Clooney…not the isn’t-it-so-great-that-I’m-this-handsome-but-I-can-also-play-a-complete-moron George Clooney. His performance in Michael Clayton was nothing short of masterful, and that movie should have won the Oscar in 2007, not No Country For Old Men (and don’t even get me started on the hamtastic, impossibly pretentious slog that was There Will Be Blood). But I just can’t get behind the George Clooney as buffoon thing. I don’t buy it. I only enjoyed The Men Who Stare At Goats—a film that desperately wants to be Dr. Strangelove—slightly more than Batman & Robin. And being that I left the theater in tears after seeing that one (literally), that’s saying something.

Don’t get me wrong, the cast is tremendous. In addition to Clooney, there’s Ewan McGregor (who I liked more in this film than I have in his other films), Kevin Spacey, Stephen Lang, and Jeff Bridges. I love Jeff Bridges too! But he’s playing The Dude 2.0 from The Big Lebowski. The movie claims to be based on a true story, but for a comedy about people learning to focus their minds, The Men Who Stare At Goats comes off as oddly unfocused and meandering. It’s basically a few very funny scenes strung together in search of a narrative. It’s a movie I would watch clips of, but I would never watch the whole thing ever again.

If you haven’t seen the trailers (and if nothing else, the film has been well-marketed), the story concerns Ewan McGregor’s reporter Bob Wilton, who stumbles onto the story of a lifetime when he meets Clooney’s Lyn Cassady. Lyn claims he took part in an American army unit training psychic spies to develop a buch of “Parapsychological” skills including (but not limited to) walking through walls, “cloud bursting,” invisibility, “remote viewing,” and intuition. The unit was known as the First Earth Batallion, and it was started by Jeff Bridges’ (who else?)  Bill Django, a New Age stoner kind of guy who traveled across the country in the 1970s trying every New Age deal in the book. His two best students, as it were, were Cassady and Kevin Spacey’s dastardly Larry Hooper (never trust a guy named Larry…or Tony…or Buddy). But whereas Cassdy wanted to use the force for good (a true Jedi), Hooper went over to the Dark Side.

The film picks up with Bob and Lyn in the present day, beginning a new mission in Iraq (ooh, we’re culturally relevant!). But they are kidnapped and must contend with Hooper and his evil minions. The exact nature of all this is unimportant, because the film doesn’t really care about building a plot. That’s the fundamental problem: the movie is too comfortable, too certain that it’s quirky and offbeat and relevant. It is all of those things, but it lacks a point of view. Dr. Strangelove had a point of view that was enhanced by the unchecked absurdity of the plot, but Goats does not. It’s sporadically funny and the cast is talented, but they’re not really committed to hitting it out of the park. Everything just feels too comfortable, too pat, too safe. I really think Clooney is better off when he tries to be somewhat serious.

It’s not a terribly long film, and it is competently shot by a great DP, Robert Elswit (who I had the pleasure of meeting recently). I just felt that the talent involved was capable of more, even the director, longtime Clooney friend and business partner Grant Heslov, who makes his iffy directorial debut here. Though to be fair, it’s all a big cut above anything Will Ferrell or any of the typical comedy stars put out. Seriously though, if you want to watch a war comedy with cultural relevance starring George Clooney, pop in Three Kings.