'The Men Who Stare at Goats' : Extra special forces
It's called "The Men Who Stare at Goats" for a simple reason. The "psychic spies" of Lt. Col. Bill Django's unit are, in fact, trained to stare at goats, thinking homicidal thoughts, until their little hearts stop.
And the goats drop over, dead. Killed by telepathy, you see.
And that's only one of the weapons supposedly developed by the New Age nut jobs of "Col. Bill's" unit of "Jedi Warriors." They're supposed to be "soldiers with super powers" for all those new kinds of warfare with all those new kinds of enemies.
The black comic fun in this absurdist look at modern warfare and spycraft, based on Jon Ronson's non-fiction best seller, comes from two things: 1) The film's introductory tease that "more of this is true than you would believe," and 2) The film stars George Clooney, Jeff Bridges, Kevin Spacey and Ewan McGregor.
The Men Who Stare at Goats
3 1/2 stars out of four
George Clooney, Jeff Bridges, Ewan McGregor and Kevin Spacey in Grant Heslov's black comic satire about New Age-y "psychic spies" in the Iraq War. Rated R for language, drugs and anterior nudity.
If, for instance, you were to catch someone halfway out the door on the way to this movie and you asked "Why are you seeing that?," that cast is all the answer they'd have to give you: Clooney, Bridges, Spacey and McGregor.
You can add one more: It's directed by sometime actor Grant Heslov who's best known for co-writing Clooney's Ed Murrow movie "Good Night and Good Luck" (he played Don Hewitt too.)
A few generations now have been trained by movies and literature to think of war in the modern era as absurd. We're living in a Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert era. The reason, for instance, that I stopped watching TV's "24" after its second season is that absolutely everyone on the show began to seem mad as hatters but no one seemed to suspect it.
That makes "The Men Who Stare at Goats" a minor but solid success, in that our story is told onscreen — wildly — by a journalist who went to war when his wife started taking up with his one-armed editor. He's played by Ewan McGregor, whose constant mix of earnestness, befuddlement, desperation and self-pity will be instantly recognizable to other members of his species.
Clooney — as Lyn Cassady — is his guide through this world after an encounter in Iraq.
Drolly funny all the way through, Clooney is the one who stares poor little goats into oblivion. (The unit doesn't do dogs. It depresses people too much to hurt dogs, you see. Goats, somehow, are more expendable.)
It is he who expounds on the marvelously crackpot military vision of "Col. Bill," who wants to fight all future wars with love and dance classes ("to free your mind, you must free your feet first") and telepathy and good weed, in addition to all that noisy, heavy, flesh-rending hardware.
"Col. Bill" got his basic idea for the unit, we're told, when he discovered that most new soldiers in combat always shoot too high in their first engagement with an enemy. Why? Because they don't really want to kill anybody.
So he spends a few years thinking about how that basic, if hidden, fact about Western manhood can be fashioned into a superior kind of soldier — a New Age warrior who could teach at the Esalen Institute but is deadly enough for the crazy complexities of combat in the Middle East.
The Western idea that war isn't just hell but absurd, too, began with Jaroslav Hasek's "The Good Soldier Schweik" in 1923, took solid hold in the '60s with "Dr. Strangelove" and "Catch-22," and has been something of a staple ever since Bush/Cheney made absurdism downright mainstream, if not mandatory. Even 9/11 had trouble moving the dial. It just magnified the madness to a much larger and more horrific scale.
It still seems to be a world run by Dr. Strangelove and his pals Jack D. Ripper, Merkin Muffley and Buck Turgidson (some of whom now speak and dress as jihadists).
"The Men Who Stare at Goats" isn't, so help me, a major vision of this kind of warfare, but it's wild enough in its crazy, crazy claims of reality to make it a whole lot better than some other movies that are kissing cousins:
Steven Soderbergh's recent "The Informant!," for instance, which gave us one incredibly creative and venal lunatic who could turn one government agency into buffoons. And David O. Russell's "Three Kings," the smug black comic 1999 Iraq/Kuwait movie in which the generally placid Clooney reputedly came to blows with the ultra-difficult director.
That Clooney now begins his bang-up late fall/winter season with this looney fantasy of real spies and soldiers is pretty good news for him (it gets better in December, when he stars in one of the year's best, Jason Reitman's adaptation of Walter Kirn's novel "Up in the Air").
At several points, of course, "The Men Who Stare at Goats" insists on telling you that "Col. Bill's" New Age nut jobs can actually do what they claim, but it's that very basic tall tale that is part of the fun. What remains ever-lunatic about war is human faith in its utility.
That choice cast here is terrific, as you would expect not just from the players but from a director who is a sometime-actor. Clooney is zestfully daffy as a man who has, by heaven, found his true calling somewhere out there, way beyond the 12-mile reef. Jeff Bridges, as "Col. Bill," is a sort of Jeff Lebowski who has graduated from his urine-stained rug into true, scruffy, countercultural grandeur. (Bridges does crazy grandeur better than anybody these days. He's the modern George C. Scott.)
Kevin Spacey is the conniving, backstabbing worm in the apple and Ewan McGregor is the witness who, for his own reasons, desperately needs to believe.
What kind of movie is this?
Let's leave you with two things: 1) The recurrent musical motto is Boston's "More Than a Feeling." 2) And a line of specimen dialogue caught on the fly is this — "Q: Where is General Noriega? A: Ask Angela Lansbury."
This is the kind of movie where someone actually does.
And where, of course, she hasn't the foggiest idea.
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