Review: Clooney’s ‘Men Who Stare at Goats’ Biased but Amusing

by Carl Kozlowski

Give the military-industrial complex an unlimited budget, and it’ll find unlimited ways to kill people. From megaton nuclear missiles to Donald Rumsfeld’s allegedly humane, small-scale nuclear “bunker busters,” and from robot soldiers to Barack Obama’s beloved predator drone planes, our nation’s finest scientific minds will find ever-newer ways to obliterate anything that gets in the path of the American Way. 

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Of course, our enemies do the best they can on the killing front as well, and at one point it was widely believed that the Soviets were engaged in training soldiers in psychic warfare. British journalist Jon Ronson stumbled across America’s response to those mental-murder programs and wrote about them extensively in his humorous nonfiction book “The Men Who Stare at Goats.” 

Now, with the help of screenwriter Peter Straughan, who has invented a streamlined story in which to connect the book’s hilarious and almost impossibly wild anecdotes, “Goats” has hit the nation’s movie screens. Fast-moving, funny, and supremely subversive entertainment of a kind that Hollywood rarely takes chances with anymore, it also arrives at a rich historical moment, as President Obama’s own decision on whether to surge or pull troops out of Afghanistan hangs in the imminent balance. 

In the film, Ewan McGregor heads off to the Mideast in the hopes of awakening the boring slumber of his life as reporter Bob Wilton in a small-city daily paper by crossing into Iraq and covering the war there. But all his efforts actually leave him stranded outside the country, until one night when he meets a man named Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), who claims he was part of an experiment program training for psychiatric warfare years before. 

The goal was to create a group of “warrior monks” called the New Earth Army, which would be able to read an enemy’s thoughts, walk through solid walls and  even kill goats by staring at them. The leader of this improbable mission was Bill Django, a former hippie turned military official who truly wanted to find a less deadly way to engage in battle and who is brought to vividly hilarious life by Jeff Bridges in a role akin to his lovably shaggy stoner in “The Big Lebowski.” 

Wilton and Cassady eventually discover that Django is being held, along with other former psychic soldiers, in a secret training camp run by renegade fellow psychic Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey). Wilton must ultimately figure out how to get out from between Django’s forces of oddball goodness and Hooper’s nefarious intentions. The result keeps the dialogue snappy and the twists coming fast, as Clooney’s producing partner Grant Heslov proves to be a steadily creative hand at the wheel of the film. 

The result is a film that enlightens as well as entertains, giving viewers a look at one of the strangest movements in American military history while making sure they have plenty to laugh about along the way. All the performances are expertly shaded at just the right level to avoid becoming over-the-top farce, and things move along at an exciting clip. 

Take a look at the track record of Clooney and Bridges, and it’ll be easy to surmise that the film takes a left-leaning slant on the events at hand. But enter with an open mind , people of all political persuasions will have a rowdy night at the movies while having plenty to talk about afterwards.


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Posted Nov 5th 2009 at 5:58 pm in Film, Reviews | 61 Comments