Staring at Goats a Wasted Effort
Reporter Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) thinks he’s just snagged the story of a lifetime. In Kuwait to theoretically cover the war in Iraq but really there to escape a mediocre marriage, he’s just hooked up with Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), a former member U.S. Army’s First Earth Battalion supposedly on a secret covert mission and he’s willing to take the journalist along for the ride.
George Clooney and friend in Overture Films' Men Who Stare at Goats
What makes Lyn so special? Supposedly he uses paranormal powers to achieve his mission objectives, and if that’s indeed true Bob can’t wait to see what happens. But for a guy supposedly on a psychic plain uniquely his own the two men sure seem to be finding their way into one heck of a lot of trouble. So much trouble, in fact, things might be far graver than either realizes, and if Bob isn’t careful the only thing that’s going to be written is his name on some Middle Eastern tombstone.
Based on the book by journalist Bob Ronson, The Men Who Stare at Goats is a movie I wish I liked more than I actually do. The cast is uniquely suited to the material, director Grant Heslov (who wrote the fantastic Good Night, and Good Luck.) keeps the tone light with just the right touch of menace, writer Peter Straughan’s (How to Lose Friends & Alienate People) script is wildly unpredictable and Robert Elswit’s (Duplicity) superb cinematography consistently sets the perfect mood.
So what’s the problem? To keep things simple, the movie just falls oddly flat. Bob’s adventures with Lyn feel more interesting than they actually are. Things happen, the pair go places, they do a few different things and encounter a variety of people yet none of what they do ever goes any further than skin deep. As satire, the movie is too unsure of itself to know where it needs to dig and how much flesh it needs to expose. As a comedy, there just aren’t enough laughs even with all the surreal absurdity. As a drama, well, as a drama it isn’t dramatic, the events taking place mostly superficial in nature and I never became emotionally invested or involved with a single one of them.
All of which is too bad because I really loved what Clooney was trying to do. He invests so much of himself in Lyn, working so hard to make him a pitiable and somewhat tragic figure. I also felt like that the great Jeff Bridges (playing the hippie commanding officer of the First Earth Battalion) stole almost every scene he appeared in, the actor emanating some of that Coen Brothers swagger we haven’t seen from him since the Dude imbibed.
There are also some great individual scenes that tickled my funny bone. The introduction of Stephen Lang’s hardened career military man is a hoot, while a third act LSD episode is so bizarrely out there it doesn’t matter that the whole sequence doesn’t make a lick of sense. McGregor has a couple of outstanding one line rejoinders that made me chuckle, while the look on Kevin Spacey’s face as he jabs Bridges in the forehead is almost worth the price of admission on its own.
All the same, Men Who Stare at Goats just doesn’t do anything most of the time other than sit there scrambling around searching for a reason to exist. It never rises to the satirical level it needs to in order to achieve success. The cast gamely tries and Heslov does his best to keep things moving but nothing anyone does can mask the fact there’s just no there there were it comes to Straughan’s script.
While I give him praise for hitting the right tone I just as surely damn him for not being able to flesh out an interesting narrative worthy of the fuss. The whole thing plays like a series of vaguely connected vignettes that barely have anything to do with one another, and while insight and hilarity can at times be gleamed overall there is a strange flatness keeping the majority of the film frustratingly out of reach.
I wanted to like this movie, spent long portions of it trying to will myself into a state of enjoyment that for whatever reason kept refusing to come. But for all that effort on my part the film never lived up to its potential, Men Who State at Goats a wearisome effort from a team of esteemed and talented craftsmen whose inability to entertain borders on the paranormal.
Film Rating: êê (out of 4)
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