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The Men Who Stare at Goats
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Written by Henry Mouat
Grade: B
Men Who Stare at Goats easily wins the award for Most Peculiar Title of the Year; even more peculiar is the fact that it about the US military. And in case you weren’t confused enough, it is about the psychic division of the US military. The Men Who Stare at Goats is an inconsistently silly satire on the US Army’s psychic pursuits. Based on a true story (according to the movie, “More of this film is true than you will believe), the film is a hilarious mockery of the military in the midst of so many Iraq-War inspired movies.
The story opens with Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor), a reporter trying to assuage the pangs of a midlife crisis by reporting on the Iraq War. By chance, he stumbles upon Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), a man claiming to have psychic capabilities. These abilities reportedly involve invisibility, ‘remote sensing’, mind control, and ‘death staring’ (to test this final ability, Clooney stops a goat’s heart simply by staring at it intensely, the act for which the film is titled). Better still, he developed these abilities through a program in the US military called the New Earth Army (NEA), a division specialized in creating psychic warriors to end conflicts without violence. The story follows with the duo’s adventure through the Iraqi desert while Clooney carries out a mission, with a detailed history of Clooney’s psychic career interwoven throughout.
As a plain comedy, Goats truly delivers. The subject matter alone easily allows the film its share of sidesplitting laughs, but then there’s Clooney himself, who steals the show with his utterly lunatic behavior. As most of the jokes are centered on him, Clooney is easily the most entertaining figure in the show. That isn’t to say that Jeff Bridges or Kevin Spacey can be overlooked as Clooney’s captain and fellow soldier, respectively. Bridges’ character largely reflects his performance as the Dude in The Big Lebowski, only this time he’s addicted to LSD instead of pot. Spacey similarly lends his trademark sour presence as the film’s mildly diabolical villain. McGregor’s character too often comes off as whiny, but since he is virtually always in Clooney’s presence, he never becomes too much of an annoyance.
It must be said that while the film has absolutely hilarious moments, it is unable to provide them consistently, and the film occasionally loses pace. The funniest moments are typically in the flashbacks of Clooney’s training; it isn’t long into the film that his adventure with McGregor in the desert loses steam. The audience is left with a strange and sometimes incoherent plot that generally feels insignificant and occasionally irrelevant. With most films, you can easily identify what the character’s goal was, and what they achieved by the finale—Goats, however, leaves you feeling under-whelmed. The result is that you will leave the theater remembering a dozen hilariously well-crafted scenes, but hardly any recollection of what the story was actually about. The fun is clearly in the journey, not the destination.
Moreover, the film isn’t a true satire. The film does not make any criticisms of the military besides the rather obvious point that the army would even have a psychic division. The film therefore is not a sharp or critical satire, yet it makes too much fun of itself to be considered any other type of comedy.
The Men Who Stare at Goats is by and large a silly idea played to some tremendous effects. While you may wish the story were more about Clooney’s career as a soldier and less about his romp in the desert with a whiny reporter, rest assured that the fun will win out, and you will leave the theater satisfied.
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November 10th, 2009 at 2:29 pm
I’ve been reading along for a while now. I just wanted to drop you a comment to say keep up the good work.
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