The Men Who Stare At Goats
The film opens with Brigadier General Dean Hopgood (Stephen Lang) staring down a wall. “I’m going into the next office,” he says, just before running into the wall. The title insert follows, “More of this is true than you would believe.” Probably.
Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor), a reporter for the Ann Arbor Daily Telegram, is in the middle of a divorce. His phone conversation with his wife ends with her new man asking when Bob’s going to pick up his stuff. If vignette after excessively whimsical character vignette disturbs you, read no further. You’ve got the picture. Otherwise…
The best we can discern is that the story revolves around Bob’s fascination, sparked by hearsay from a quack, with legendary Special Forces operative Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), and the so-called New Earth Army, organized by Bill Django (Jeff Bridges). They’re a secret branch within the military whose specialty is the psychic phenomenon of remote viewing. That is, the alleged ability to gather intelligence about events or objects from great distances through paranormal means. Django, Mr. Bridges recycling The Dude from The Big Lebowski, controverts the project for his own purposes, supposedly benevolent and righteous in nature.
The film is loaded with hilarity, even discounting the more tiresome gag of Ewan McGregor’s character being the sole person on Earth oblivious to Star Wars.. Written by Peter Straughan and directed by Grant Heslov—a better writer (Good Night, and Good Luck) than director—the film gets its title from a secret lab in which psychics were trained to induce cardiac arrest in dogs simply by concentrating on them. The soldiers empathized too much with the dogs, so they replaced them with goats.
The filmmakers’ aim is unclear. At best, it’s an assembly line of disconnected gags that rely entirely on Mr. Clooney’s sub-deadpans and Mr. McGregor’s innocent mug working perpendicular to the jokes. At worst, it’s a meditation on the greater absurdities of New Age beliefs and ideals. At its funniest, two security companies, a-la Blackwater and Halliburton, have been sent into Iraq to target each other in a cat-and-mouse battle not unlike the final shootout between Blank and Grocer in Grosse Pointe Blank.
How much of the film is based in truth is hard to say, though there are two sequences that will be loosely familiar to the conspiracy theorist. Django’s nemesis, the ultra-militant Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey), attempts to upstage the New Earth Army with mind control techniques adopted from the CIA’s 1970’s program codenamed MK ULTRA. MK ULTRA, a real program, was a failure producing uncontrollable subjects and unpredictable consequences—consequently abandoned. So, too, is Hooper’s project a catastrophe. The other is a recurring theme involving songs from the children’s television show “Barney the Dinosaur” used in psychological warfare. During Operation Just Cause, the invasion of Panama and the overthrow of dictator Manuel Noriega, obnoxious music was blared for hours on end to wear down the opposition.
Unfortunately, Mr. Straughan and Mr. Heslov fail to assemble a narrative thread with which to tie all the otherwise loosely bound scenes. It will, undoubtedly, receive praise for being unconventional. However, technology and technique are often confused. Snipping together a movie in a way that doesn’t tell a story can be viewed as brilliant nonconformism or petulant ineptitude.
The Men Who Stare At Goats • Dolby® Digital surround sound in select theatres • Aspect Ratio: 2.39:1 • Running Time: 93 minutes • MPAA Rating: R for language, some drug content and brief nudity. • Distributed by Overture Films