The Men Who Stare At Goats

[November 4th, 2009]

Like most movies based on investigative journalism, this adaptation of Jon Ronson’s book—about the U.S. Army’s misadventures in telepathic warfare—feels like an appetizer, with the whole story left dangling tantalizingly close. But that frustration is exacerbated by The Men Who Stare at Goats, which, like the military’s secret New Earth Battalion, starts ever so promisingly before realizing it doesn’t know what to do with its powers. It’s a rare film that can treat the freeing of Iraqi prisoners of war as an afterthought, lost behind the freeing of barnyard animals. But here we are.

Ewan McGregor plays a fictionalized Ronson as another variation on the journalist-as-hysterical-sniveler model. He warms a seat in a Kuwaiti hotel bar and encounters George Clooney, who admits he is not actually a waste-disposal contractor but a Jedi warrior. “What’s a Jedi warrior?” asks McGregor, displaying a mercifully selective memory. It’s a psychic soldier, trained by a hippie visionary (Jeff Bridges, coasting blissfully by) to disarm America’s enemies in the nonviolent tradition of “Jesus Christ, Lao Tze Tung, Walt Disney.” Clooney, who for once doesn’t know he’s funny just because he’s got a mustache, brags that with a little booze he can locate lost comrades, stop goat hearts and become invisible—or almost: “Eventually we adapted it to finding a way of not being seen.”

The film’s revelations—all too absurd to be concocted—are gleefully staged, as interlopers led by Kevin Spacey find ways to bring colonial oppression back into the mix. But director Grant Heslov (a journeyman actor) stresses the punch lines, as if he’d been watching Coen brothers movies and thought they were only about jokes. Goats is probably the first comedy to show the U.S. military-industrial complex torturing kittens and dachshunds, but it’s one of many War on Terror satires to join its targets in blithe dismissal of brown-skinned collateral. At the movie’s end, after the goats (and prisoners) have been loosed, McGregor complains the mass media seized only on the part of his reporting that involved torture, which is a bit disingenuous of him (we’re watching a movie about your reporting, aren’t we?) and at any rate is an all-star case of ignoring the ethical meaning of your story. Too bad. A mind reader is a terrible thing to waste. R.