Be Still My Bleating Heart
I can’t blame writer’s block on this one. There’s something about The Men Who Stare at Goats that has made it impossible for me to sit down and put my thoughts into words. This shouldn’t be a Home Video Review, after all: I saw the movie in theatres last fall, and again two weeks ago on blu-ray. But I’m here now, writing, and I’m going to muscle through this bad boy.
Maybe the problem is that I find it hard to recommend or even describe the film to people who ask me about it. Typically, the conversation goes like this:
Random: Hey, did you see The Men Who Stare at Goats?
Me: Oh, yeah! It’s great!
Random: Really? I was gonna check it out, but I heard some not-so-great things. Is it funny?
Me: It’s really funny. But I didn’t really laugh. Maybe the first time I saw it, I laughed a couple times. The second time, I kind of chuckled once.
Random: That doesn’t sound like a very good comedy.
Me: Well, it’s not really a comedy. I mean, it is, but it’s also a political satire, and adventure, and kind of like a newspaper story brought to life.
Random: Oh. Sounds…awesome.
Granted, I’m not that great on selling movies to people in person. My enthusiasm causes me to stammer and talk in half-sentences until I eventually find an intelligible groove. But this movie in particular has given me no shortage of headaches; I don’t know if anyone’s yet listened to my insistence that they see it.
We’ll see if my typed words fare any better.
The story centers on a Michigan journalist named Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor). After his wife leaves him for his editor, Bob sets out to find fame and self-esteem as a correspondent in the newly launched Iraq war. His ticket into the combat zone is a gruff security expert named Lyn Cassady (George Clooney). It turns out Lyn is a former psychic spy (or “Jedi”) for the U.S. Army, and he’s on a mission of his own—to track down his former commanding officer, Bill Django (Jeff Bridges), who sent a distress message with his mind.
On this road trip marked by kidnappings and roadside bombs, Lyn fills Bob in on the history of the Jedi. Formed as Django’s attempt to re-fashion the post-Viet-Nam-War military into a more culture- and planet-conscious entity, he got funding to start a unit of peaceful warriors. He recruited soldiers who displayed psychic gifts and honed their talents into tasks as mundane as developing non-lethal weapons to as extraordinary as psychically locating missing persons and stopping the hearts of de-bleated goats.
Cassady was in Django’s unit, as was the petty and sinister Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey). Hooper was immune to the Jedi’s brotherhood-of-man charms (and its slogan, “Be All That You Can Be”), and instead manipulated those around him to his own twisted ends. This led to Django’s eventual disappearance and re-appearance in Lyn Cassady’s mind.
What Bob and Lyn find in the desert is funny in one sense, but darkly tragic in many others. In this way, the story reflects the way the movie tells it. The Men Who Stare at Goats is based on the non-fiction book by British journalist Jon Ronson. I don’t know how much of the Jedi’s story is true, but it’s a fascinating idea; one that doesn’t need the comic relief provided by the Bob character.
It feels like director Grant Heslov and screenwriter Peter Straughan were pressured to make the movie marketable by injecting every other scene with Bob doing something cute and naïve, or having an overblown reaction to whatever situation he finds himself in (the movie is guilty of this, too: we see Bob get into a fight with his editor, who has a prosthetic arm; this is meant to, I guess, lend quirkiness to the scene, but it just comes off as desperate). Did the filmmakers not trust their audience to come aboard their strange ride unless they were lured in by slapstick?
Speaking of strange, I’d like to take a sidebar here and talk about digital smoothing. I can’t be sure what process was used to make Kevin Spacey look twenty years younger in the flashbacks, but it was distracting as hell. He seemed to have a bright orange glow emanating from his collar, and his lips moved as unnaturally as the talking babies in that investment commercial. The effect was applied to Clooney, too—or maybe it was just lots of makeup—but his early-eighties-drifter haircut drew attention away from his tangerine cheeks.
Anyway, the movie has problems (not the least of which is the fact that it’s an anti-Bush polemic that came out in late 2009; had it been on a double-bill with Heslov and Clooney’s superior Good Night, and Good Luck in 2005, it might have avoided the awkward sting of irrelevance).
But if you can put the goofy stuff out of your mind (huh, huh, Ewan McGregor says “Jedi” a lot, get it?), and dig into the beautiful story underneath, you’ll find a movie that represents what Lewis Black once called a “renaissance of the human spirit”. It’s about men working within the system to heal their own souls and mend the conscience of a nation—and that nation’s infrastructure biting them in the ass for their troubles. There are great ideas and cool twists here, too (meaning you can just enjoy this as a movie, if you prefer to ignore all the hippie nonsense). And, with the exception of McGregor’s hysterics, the movie is anchored by outstanding performances (Bridges was robbed of a Supporting Actor nod last year).
I can’t recommend this film highly enough.
Well, I guess I just did.
Tried, anyway.