- Directed by Grant Heslov
- Written by Peter Straughan, inspired by the book by Jon Ronson
- Starring
- George Clooney
- Ewan McGregor
- Jeff Bridges
- Kevin Spacey
- Stephen Lang
- Produced by Paul Lister, George Clooney and Grant Heslov
Given George Clooney’s track record of using political cinema as a platform for tiresome Republican-bashing, I had some trepidation about him co-producing and co-starring in a movie “inspired by” (i.e., fictionalized to one’s heart’s content) an account of military experiments into remote viewing and other “psychic warfare” techniques in the ’80s. The big difference between The Men Who Stare at Goats and Clooney’s catalog of political diatribes is that this is not a movie to be taken seriously. Or rather, it’s not a movie that insists that you take it seriously. Except that it might. Ambiguity, ain’t it wonderful?
“No sir, they’re not for you, sir. They’re for the goat, sir.”
Ewan McGregor is Bob Wilton, a reporter for a mid-sized newspaper who volunteers for Middle Eastern duty during the opening days of the Iraq War, in order to prove a nebulous something to himself and to his wife who had just left him for his editor. While waiting in Kuwait for some sort of travel arrangements into Iraq, he randomly meets Lyn “Skip” Cassady (Clooney), a civilian non-security contractor rep. But Wilton has heard Cassady’s name before, from a crackpot he interviewed several months ago who claimed to be a veteran of a secret military program involved in psychic soldiering. Cassady’s reaction demonstrates to Wilton that he was, indeed, involved with… something. And desperate for a story, Wilton attaches himself to Cassady to travel into Iraq.
“I know — sorta reminds you of your last bender before you reported for duty, doesn’t it?”
Along the way, Cassady opens up about the “New Earth Army” and its founder, Bill Django (Jeff Bridges), who came away from an out-of-body experience in Viet Nam with a determination to find “alternative” methods of military intervention, a quest which took him through the entire New Age counter-culture for most of the ‘70s until he returned to Fort Bragg to start a program with the stated goal of turning gifted or sensitive soldiers into “Jedi knights.” The narrative thus is split between Cassady and Wilton’s adventures together, and flashbacks to Cassady’s time with Django in the program — scenes which, Wilton implicitly admits up front, come entirely from an unreliable source.
Because Cassady is crazy. Or is he? Wilton is desperate enough to grasp at straws, and Cassady’s confidence in his own powers, which he fully acknowledges are unreliable at best, almost persuades him from time to time that Cassady was an honest participant in a viable if unorthodox program before his habitual rationality, and the out-of-control situations that Cassady keeps leading them into, pulls him repeatedly back to the “Lyn Cassady is off his rocker” camp.
George Clooney and friend.
What kind of situations? A car crash in the middle of the desert, followed by a kidnapping, followed by a shootout between private military contractor outfits (whoops). Wilton is looking for a galvanizing purpose and direction in his life; Cassady, claiming to actually be in Iraq as part of a reactivated “covert op” for the New Earth Army, is looking to recapture the glory days of being something larger and more noble than himself, as well as find some sort of redemption for what he considers an unforgivable sin in the self-destructing days of the program: just to demonstrate he could, he killed a goat with the power of his mind. Stories of redemption always resonate with me, although I wish that director Heslov had felt confident enough that he hadn’t had Wilton state it in so many words in the third act of the movie. We get it, thank you.
“Wait! With the bridge of your nose covered — you look just like Batman!”
What makes this movie so uproariously funny is that it’s not a comedy — in other words, screenwriter Peter Straughan didn’t feel forced to string the story from gag to obligatory gag (which, in the current Hollywood climate, means the inclusion of yet another hit-in-the-testicles scene). Wilton, who functions as the audience identification character, straddles the fence in seeing both how seriously Cassady takes everything he says and does, and how ridiculous those same actions seem from the safehouse of rationality. Kudos as well to both Clooney and the makeup man responsible for Clooney and Bridges, allowing them to believably play two iterations of the characters of Cassady and Djando separated by a couple of decades. (Kevin Spacey, who plays the wolf-in-the-fold Hooper, has much less to do, as he’s almost a pantomime villain — in other words, he simply has to recycle his Lex Luthor persona from Superman Returns, but with hair.) And of course, if it seems that too much footage has gone by without a light moment, you just have to remember that it’s Ewan “Obi-Wan” McGregor who’s testing the claims of this “Jedi warrior.”
“How did I end up playing a Padowan again?“
Because this is a Hollywood movie dealing with issues of spiritual reality, it has to end up noncommittal, though it never shuts the door on the claims of the New Earth Army; the conclusion seems to be that it’s all fake, but part of a broader truth — a position which either seems deep or watered-down, depending on the viewer’s own relationship to the concept of faith. Of course, whenever you deal with the question of what is “really” happening in a fiction (and I think that a movie “inspired by” a nonfiction book is fictionalized enough to qualify), you have to remember that all such ambiguities are a part of the artifice; there is no one explanation to discover, save that the auteur meant either interpretation to be supportable. In other words, Cassady’s story make be fake – but then, so is Wilton’s.
Some Notable Totables:
- body count: roughly 23, plus 1 goat
- breasts: 8
- pasty male butts: 3
- explosions: 1, plus 4 in stock footage
- ominous thunderstorms: 0
- actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 4
- Stephen Root (“Gus Lacey,” the person Wilton first interviewed) played “Captain K’Vada” in the TNG two-parter “Unification”
- Glenn Morshower (“Major Holtz”) played “Ensign Burke” in the TNG episode “Peak Performance, “Orton” in the TNG episode “Starship Mine,” “Enterprise-B Conn Officer” in Generations, “Guard #1″ in the Voyager episode “Resistance” “MacReady” in the Enterprise episode “North Star”
- Tim Griffin (“Tim Kootz”) played “Kelvin Engineer” in the 2009 Star Trek
- Robert Curtis Brown (“General Brown”) played “Vedek Sorad” in the DS9 episode “Sanctuary” and “Ambassador” in the Voyager episode “Natural Law”
This would be a hard one for me to watch because the book is about very real, very stupid, very expensive experiments done by the real Pentagon. I know I shouldn’t connect books to movie adaptations, but I do.
“cinema as a platform for tiresome Republican-bashing.”
Sigh.
4,500 dead American soldiers!!!!
0 WMDS
0 Links to Al Quaeda.
Does it ever get tiresome, bashing the party responsible for that?
Oh wait, what do you care?
That’s right, Todd. Because I think that movies makes a lousy platform for screechy preaching (and gives a lousy return for a studio’s investment to boot), I obviously don’t care. And thanks for using four exclamation points!!!! to make your case.
Todd, WMD were found. Not nukes but chemical weapons. Also that was one of fourteen rationals for the invasion. Perhaps you should aim your anger at the Democrats who voted for invasion while at the same time claiming they didn’t have time to read the bill but voted for it anyway.
This is going to devolve into “who’s to blame for was in Iraq” things you yankees are fond of so much?
And how is it that nathan is going from obscure movies to the ones that haven’t yet reached my country?
Because I got a stack of “for your consideration” screeners thanks to my membership in the Online Film Critics Society, and since voting in the OFCS year-end awards is mandatory to membership, I decided to burn through at least a few of them.
I read the original article and I loved it… so absurd. not too sure about seeing the movie
I know at least one person (whose opinion I respect) who absolutely hated it. Me, though, I thought that it would probably be in my Top Ten for the year if I had seen ten theatrical releases this year.
>I think that movies makes a lousy platform for screechy preaching
Considering that the mainstream media isn’t doing the job (you know, asking questions), I find it refreshing that Clooney is willing to say what he’s thinking, and he’s using the medium he works in to make those points. And the last time I checked, I’m still unconvinced that his films were “bashing-Republicans”, that’s simply your opinion. Unless, of course, you thought Joe McCarthy was on the right track, I guess I can understand where you came to the conclusions you did.
>(and gives a lousy return for a studio’s investment to boot),
Regarding how much a film makes is irrelevant, with regards to its quality and its message, and you know this. Lots of war-themed movies (The Reader, Black Book) make very little money; so by your rationale, should we stop making war-themed movies because the mainstream audiences aren’t connecting with them? Should directors with a passion for pointing out indignities by an evil and corrupt government (that starts wars based on lies for profit) not be allowed to make movies?
Clearly you never lost anyone in that stupid war.
Clearly you don’t care.
Oh, and I got your four exclamation points for ya.
! -1
! – 2
! – 3
! – 4
I hate it when reviewers use their forum to make political points. I hates it I tells ya!
Todd,
I confine my debates to those who are willing to hold themselves to rational terms, not those who use personal loss as a proxy for moral vision and overreaching ad hominems in place of the assumption of good faith on the part of those with differing opinions. Have a nice life.
Nathan,
That’s quite eloquent. May I quote you?
Sure. (phew) Here I thought you were going to tell me about a typo…
Watch it with those completely valid stereotypes.
Todd, I don’t think anyone said Clooney should not be allowed to make movies. Where did that come from? I think Nathan said he found a subset of Clooneys movies tiresome. Censorship and preferance are very different things
It’s amazing!!!!!!!! Who would have thought you’d encounter opinions from a reviewer on his/her own movie review website…
Nathan: Please note my use of EIGHT exclamation marks (as well as emphasis via capitalization). Thus my point is far, far more valid than Todd’s.
Todd- shut up, you’re as brainwashed as the ones you are accusing of being brainwashed. Ugh. Nathan, I hope you don’t have to deal with that often.
On to the movie. Haven’t seen it yet, but from what I’ve seen and read it looks like it could be fun (for me).
Keep up the good work!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (beat 16 exclamation points, suckers!) (17)
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Need I say any more?
The book was very painful to get through because the subject matter was real, but I think as a fictional account I could overlook the painful waste and expense.
I don’t really have anything to say on the political thing, being a Canuck, other than that it sounds a great deal like my toddler and my seven year-old pointing fingers at each other over a bowl of spilled Cheerios and milk. The finger pointing’s wonderful, but one of them grabbing the vacuum would be considerably more helpful.
Hope that’s a shop vac!
I just like to mock the ignorance.
Let’s see, there’s Good Night and Good Luck, which (as Todd said) is more anti-McCarthy than anti-Republican. The Informant! and Michael Clayton are “EE-vil corporation”-bashing. I’m not familiar with Syriana but IMDB says it’s “politically charged.” So yeah, I guess he has a track record of his politics influencing his movies. That’s OK with me though.
I wonder how he would have done that with a movie about psychic warfare? I guess the cliche would be to have peaceful researchers shocked, shocked when their military funders want to apply their discoveries to war (as in Dreamscape or The Lawnmower Man). But that wouldn’t be an issue when the project is started by the Pentagon. How did you see it playing out, in your initial misgivings?
I think it’s mostly OK to include your personal perspective in a movie as long as it stays part of the subtext, instead of being shoved down your captive audience’s throat. I like George Romero’s earlier movies but not his recent ones for partly that reason.
Hear, hear.
I second Erin’s comment as well as your final response to Todd, Nathan.
Getting back to the movie – not bad but I find movie-as-political-soapboxing pretty damn tiresome. However, George Clooney blowing up goats with his mind? That’s got ‘drinking game’ written ALL over it.
I rather loathe preachy political theater myself, though that might just be because I’m mostly to the right and the preachy political theater is virtually all to the left. As for Todd the Troll, I’ll say only that his irrelevant rant reminds me a lot of the scene from Idiocracy where President Camacho is pushing a questionable new solution to everybody’s problems and one of his antagonists in the “House of Representin’” yells out “I got a solution: you’re a dick!”
As for the movie, well, I haven’t seen it myself, but I do know the history of our various military forces conducting supernatural experiments is real enough. Considering that these experiments seem to have been mostly a complete waste of money and yielded stupid and disappointing results, I can see how a story about them played the right way could pull a few good horselaughs at the absurdity of the whole enterprise.
At the same time, a non-committal ending is rather appropriate to the subject, since there’s usually some reason for even the strangest of activities. America did have the Cold War going on with Russia at the time, and recently opened archives from the former Soviet Union reveal that our secret agents’ reports that Russia and its satellites were experimenting with “psychic power” were by no means inaccurate, though how successful any of these experiments actually were is still very much in dispute. In other words, Strangelovian as it may seem, our government did have some reason to be concerned that we would have a “psychic power gap” with Russia if we didn’t research this stuff ourselves.
The real absurdity of it all is that people kept trying to apply the scientific method to stuff that, by its very definition, is beyond the scientific method’s reach. Magic and miraculous events are supernatural, literally “above and beyond nature,” and science is the study of nature. In other words, science is supposed to be about nature’s laws, not the exceptions to those laws; yet the supernatural is by definition exceptional to those laws.
Supernatural events are not repeatable, not predictable, and not subject to natural law. Therefore, all attempts at scientific study for them are doomed to frustration and failure even if they happen to get a positive result; they won’t be able to repeat the result consistently and may not even be able to repeat it at all.
I say this as a believer in God and the Bible and free will and all the supernatural stuff involved in each. The reason scientists studying “psychic” phenomena can never quite seem to get their act together enough to publish anything favoring its reality that stands up to skeptical scrutiny is that the supernatural answers to absolutely nobody’s demands for a repeat performance. The Bible records the miracle-working Jesus saying as much to people when they made such demands of him.
Of course, this inability to test the supernatural empirically is also the reason so many don’t believe in it, but such skepticism leads to the further absurdity of putting one’s faith in materialism, which is every bit as untestable as the supernatural. That’s why this film left open either interpretation while committing to neither. Judging by your review, it may also have left open a third possibility: that the supernatural exists, but is not what the character Cassady believes–or claims to believe–it is.
I think that one of the points of research into psychic warfare (and yes, the movie alludes to the fact that Russian research into psi ops was one of the main triggers for the U.S. starting their own program, just in case it was real) was that it might not have been “supernatural” by the common definition that you gave, i.e., that it might be controllable along certain principles and was as natural a part of human psychology as anything else (although, since it was intimately related to that psychology, would be as unpredictable as human behavior generally is in the individual). I think that is part of the point of all parapsychological research: that what we have assumed to be “supernatural” — ghosts, psychic abilities, etc. — is actually natural and thus discoverable by research.
As shown in the movie, though, having such a program led by a dedicated hippy under the aegis of the U.S. military probably isn’t the best scenario…
Yes, I suppose the belief that these were actually natural powers probably was the central doctrine of those who advocated in favor of researching it, although I would sooner call it their fatal conceit. Of course, a great many skeptical philosophers–myself included–would call into question whether psychology itself can really be considered a genuine science, given that some aspects of the human mind–the known existence of purely abstract concepts and the possible existence of free will–are arguably supernatural by that working definition.
The military may actually be one of the better organizations for doing some directly applicable scientific research, given that its research did bring us ARPAnet, which in turn produced our internet. Still, I think their psi ops projects were pretty much doomed from the start no matter who they put in charge of them. (That part about it being dedicated hippies in charge of the projects wasn’t entirely fictional either, although I seem to recall it was actually the CIA that tried shooting a few test subjects up with LSD to see if it would give them any special powers.)
Call it “applied science” rather than “pure science” — if experimental data yields consistent results in psychological research, then regardless of whether the core of the entity is “supernatural” by any of the common definitions, it can be treated as “natural” in terms of predicting cause and effect.
That’s not saying that psychology is a non-subjective “hard science,” only that philosophical objections to it do not affect its practical utility one way or another.
Or maybe I could say it’s “applied metaphysics” from where I’m sitting. Of course, in the military it’s the “applied” part that matters.