Grant Heslov (2009)

Maybe it’s just because I’m seeing more films than ever but the ones capsized by a poor script seem to be increasing rapidly too.  Quite often, the problem is that bright people take a subject that feels like a great idea – an idea whose attractions certainly have a mesmerising effect on the film-makers:  they don’t know how to make it work but they think the intrinsic brilliance of the conception is bound to pay off.    The Men Who Stare at Goats is ‘inspired by’ the British journalist Jon Ronson’s 2004 book about the US army’s experiments with New Age concepts and the paranormal as potential military applications.   This does sound like the germ of a rich political comedy, and the film has its charms and its moments, but the screenplay by Peter Straughan (also British) seems like an early draft.  Straughan and the director Grant Heslov (who co-wrote Good Night and Good Luck with George Clooney, which Heslov also produced) don’t find an imaginative way of linking the flashbacks to the 1980s (and earlier) – when these unconventional post-hippie military techniques were supposedly being developed within the armed forces – with the ‘present tense’ of the story.  This takes place in the weeks immediately following the American invasion of Iraq in March 2003.  There’s a point at which Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), a veteran psychic soldier, and Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor), a reporter who’s come to the Gulf to prove his journalistic manhood after his wife left him for the editor of the Michigan daily on which Bob works, are stranded in the desert and have no idea where to go next.  The image seems to express the situation of the film.  These two men might as well be Grant Heslov and Peter Straughan.

One of the comic high points occurs in one of the flashback sequences, shortly after we’re introduced to Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey).  Hooper meets Bill Django (Jeff Bridges), the Vietnam vet turned New Earth Army philosopher who leads the psychic warfare training, at a spoon-bending party.  Django is impressed with Hooper’s effect on the cutlery and recruits him to his team of ‘Jedi Warriors’, as the New Earth Army are informally known.  We next see Hooper at a wedding reception when he congratulates the happy couple, adding, ‘Sorry things don’t work out for you two’.  There are other good lines in the script but not so many as to make the ESP jokes self-sufficient – the film still needs a propelling narrative.  And the tone is uncertain:  much of the time it’s droll rather than bitterly satirical, so that a warfare sequence in Vietnam or the appearance of Iraqi prisoners emerging from sensory disorientation sessions seems off- key.  Hooper is a dark arts man, inclined to the harmful application of paranormal techniques in warfare and the essential rival of Cassady, who’s traumatised by the knowledge that he violated the New Earth Army code when he agreed to use his mental powers to stop the heart of a goat.  The four main characters finally get together in 2003 at an American military base in the desert, where Hooper is now the head of PSIC, a private research firm carrying out psychological and psychic experiments on goats and Iraqis.  The elderly Django, fallen on hard times and much the worse for drink, is one of his employees; and Cassady is shocked to see the great man brought so low.  But the air of amused eccentricity that hangs over The Men Who Stare at Goats tends to muffle the moral contrasts between the characters.  You don’t really care what happens, you just relax into watching the performers.

Ewan McGregor as Bob Wilton is a microcosmic example of the seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time syndrome which afflicts the film.  McGregor is playing Wilton presumably because of his Jedi Warrior past (as Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Stars Wars prequel) and because that must have seemed a good joke when the film was cast.  McGregor does pretty well in the part but he’s at a considerable disadvantage (not least because he has to shoulder most of the first part of the picture, which is especially clumsy).  It’s not a problem, once the film moves to the Gulf War region, that McGregor gamely tries and fail to keep up with George Clooney’s wit – Wilton is essentially a hapless straight man to Cassady.  It’s more a problem that McGregor lacks a sufficiently definite persona from previous roles to make him an amusing stooge by his very presence on screen.   Even so, he has one thing in common with Clooney, Spacey and Bridges, which goes a good way towards redeeming the picture.    There’s a streak of self-indulgence running through this whole enterprise (you get it in the arch ‘More of this is true than you would believe’ that comes up on the screen at the start) but the actors don’t let the self-indulgence show in front of the camera.  They know they won’t be funny if we can see them thinking they’re funny – yet they’re skilful enough to impart to the audience their enjoyment in their roles and teamwork.

Clooney easily overshadows McGregor but has a tougher time holding his own in the sequence when he and the goat stare hard at each other.  The animal is a natural – I especially liked the moment when one of its ears flicked.  What Clooney does with his eyes in this film is no doubt another in-joke but it’s pleasing anyway.   The Jedi Warriors’   armoury includes the ‘sparkly eyes technique’, which Clooney demonstrates to McGregor at one point on their drive in the desert.  Apart from locking eyes with the goat, however, Clooney, who has been known to overuse his peepers, keeps the ocular activity subdued.   The psychic soldiers in the 1980s are uniformed hippies – Clooney has a wig that makes him look convincingly younger (and a bit like George Harrison) and Jeff Bridges a pigtail.   Bridges overdoes Django’s decrepitude a bit in the closing sequence but he’s very likeable and his size and vigour give body to the film in more ways than one.   Spacey, with an ugly moustache (that makes him, as Sally said, look like a Bob Mortimer character) has, of course, done malignant smugness before but it seems a while ago – it’s good to see him back.   Stephen Root plays the ex-psychic soldier whom Wilton interviews for the Ann Arbor paper. Robert Patrick is the gung-ho head of a private security firm in post-invasion Iraq .  The cinematography is by Robert Elswit and the agreeable score by Rolfe Kent .

14 November 2009