Off the deep end in military-style screwball comedy
GEORGE Clooney's latest film, The Men Who Stare at Goats, is based on the non-fiction novel of the same name by influential Jewish Gonzo journalist-cum-author John Ronson.
ADAM KAMIEN
GEORGE Clooney’s latest film, The Men Who Stare at Goats, is based on the non-fiction novel of the same name by influential Jewish Gonzo journalist-cum-author John Ronson.
Ronson spent years researching the US military’s attempts to harness paranormal and psychic powers for use in battle and inspired a documentary series.
The Men Who Stare at Goats is a screwball comedy played out by an all-star cast including Clooney, Jeff Bridges, Kevin Spacey and Ewan McGregor.
Small-town newspaper reporter Bob Wilton (McGregor) goes to Iraq to prove a point to his wife, who left him for his editor. Waiting for clearance in Kuwait, he meets Lyn Cassady (Clooney), a retired army man who claims he was part of the First Earth Battalion, an outfit which experimented with psychic and paranormal warfare.
Through flashback and voiceover, it is revealed that the leader of the group is Vietnam veteran Bill Django, a hippy looking for meaning in a vision that came to him after he was shot on a tour of duty.
Members of the First Earth Battalion call themselves “Jedi” — nodding to McGregor’s forgettable turn as Obi-Wan Kenobe in the three Star Wars prequels. And everything is going swimmingly until Larry Hooper (Spacey) rats on Django to save his own hide after a failed experiment with LSD, and the unit turns to the “dark side”.
Back in the present (the film is set in 2003), Wilton and Cassady embark on a road trip from Kuwait to Iraq, with some wacky Cheech & Chong-style results
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Directed by Grant Heslov, Clooney’s writing partner on Good Night And Good Luck (2005), The Men Who Stare At Goats is an entertaining, if slightly confused, farce. Writer Peter Straughan seems content to let the bizarre true events carry his screenplay, rather than sound story-telling techniques. The film has many zany moments, but the characters are superficial for the most part, and it is thin on plot.
There are some genuinely affecting moments, including one scene when Wilton reflects on the terrible cost of taking another life (albeit that of a goat), but they are few and far between. At times the film can’t decide whether to be an anti-war allegory or a straight-up romp.
It’s probably going too far to call this film derivative, but there are plenty of familiar elements. Clooney channels his O Brother Where Art Thou buffoon Everitt, while Bridges’ Django bears striking similarity to the Dude, his character from the Big Lebowski.
McGregor is constantly lampooning his role in the most recent Star Wars movies and the film has shades of Three Kings, a previous Clooney film about the first Gulf War.
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