The Men Who Stare at Goats

Rating

Director

Grant Heslov

Screenplay

Peter Straughan (Book: Jon Ronson)

Length

94 min.

Starring

George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges, Kevin Spacey, Stephan Lang, Robert Patrick, Waleed Zuaiter, Stephen Root

MPAA Rating

R for language, some drug content and brief nudity.

Review

If the title doesn’t tell you what kind of picture you’re in for, then nothing will. The Men Who Stare at Goats is an oft humorous, sometimes frustrating feature from Good Night, and Good Luck. co-writer Grant Heslov.

A distinct departure from his and George Clooney’s broadcast journalism feature, Goats takes on the humorous subject of the military’s secret psychic warrior training program. Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) is a small time print journalist whose marriage dissolution has sent him scrambling to find a way to fill the void in his life. He decides being an Iraq war correspondent would be just the ticket and he proceeds across the world to sit in a Green Zone hotel waiting for his big break to get him behind the lines.

His big break comes in the form of an innocuous mustachioed salesman who turns out to be one of the best psychic warriors ever trained by the military. Lyn Cassady (George Clooney) has seen and done a great many things and is now following a vision he had to rendezvous in the desert on a secret mission that threatens his life. When Bob recognizes his name from an interview he’d had several months prior, he latches onto Cassady and follows him into the bowels of hell as he learns more about Lyn’s life and training and all about the military’s secret program.

Thankfully avoiding too many political statements, the film bounces back and forth between flashbacks and the present as we find out what emotional distresses have brought Lyn to this point in his life and the world. Clooney plays Cassady with a serio-comic abandon reserved for actors who don’t have to worry about being typecast or unemployed. McGregor, on the other hand, is mostly just the passing bystander of the film. His character is an irritation that only infrequently provides amusement.

And like the lead pair, the other actors in the film are a mixed bag of quality. Jeff Bridges is a good, if fairly unexceptional addition to the cast. His Vietnam vet-turned-hippy soldier who petitions the military for the psychic training program is fairly well stereotyped making him hard to love in the role. Kevin Spacey is as frustrating as ever, parlaying his egocentric real life attitude into his performance as Larry Hooper, a psychic soldier who believes himself to be better than is fellows and frustrated that he can’t top Cassady.

Heslov has a great deal of work to do to become a better director. The film has too many valleys of inactivity and too many far-fetched situations to be a credible picture. This may be a comedy, but an occasionally uneven comedy isn’t a great one. That the film ends up working at the end is testament not to Heslov’s talents behind the camera, but to the written word, created by screenwriter Peter Straughan from the novel by Jon Ronson. His words are most often the cleverest part of the film. The situations are entirely far fetched, but so is the basic plot of the film, so most of it fits well together.

Without Clooney, the film would not be as successful as it is. His dry delivery is the only thing that keeps the weakest scenes in the film from drifting into banality.

Nitpick of the day (having nothing to do with the quality of the picture, but because of something in the picture): After the third time in the same year you’ve seen a funny quip at the beginning of a story regarding the veracity of the subject matter, you just want to ask why everyone is playing copycat.

Review Written

December 2, 2009