MasterChugs Theater: ‘The Men Who Stare at Goats’

The key question about The Men Who Stare at Goats is not whether it is true (it totally is though it allegedly is).

The key question is whether it will make you laugh.

No allegedly about it-it will. Oh, how it will. Click the jump to see why.

The Men Who Stare at Goats sounds like an ethnographic documentary about the Bushmen of the Kalahari. It is not. Instead, first-time director Grant Heslov has come up with a quirky comedic fiction inspired by one of the strangest true stories about the modern American Army: In the late ’70s, as journalist Jon Ronson reported in his book of the same name, some high-ranking officers preached that the techniques and beliefs of the New Age counterculture could transform military practice, and they tried to put some of those techniques to work. The goal, as Jeff Bridges’ long-haired, laid-back Bill Django puts it in the movie:

“We must become the first superpower to develop superpowers; we must create warrior monks, men and women who can fall in love with everyone, sense plant auras, pass through walls … and see into the future.”

That dream never really came together, though. As the picture flip-flops between flashbacks illustrating Lyn Cassady’s narrative and the present time, the pair get lost in the desert, kidnapped and traded by terrorists, and then lost again in the desert. Meanwhile, the back-story progresses to a point where one new member, Larry Hooper, tried to sabotage the NEA, prepping the movie for its acidly funny climax.

The incredibly dense screenplay traverses not only 20 years of U.S. military abitions, starting in the Reagan era, but also provides its own riffs on such public scandals as Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. What saves it from getting dramatically tripped up by its own populist grandstanding are the leading performers, which motor the movie far more than the messages.

As the completely nuts Cassady, George Clooney anchors the movie in a beautifully calibrated demo of comic timing and sheer physical presence. More than just his nebbish straight man, Ewan McGregor has some of the best lines as Ronson, slicing through Clooney’s utter self-conviction with a handful of well-chosen words. Bridges, channeling The Big Lebowski, fits Django like a glove, and Kevin Spacey’s appearance midway adds some welcome tartness to all the New Age weirdness.

The Men Who Stare at Goats is an interesting entry into the action-comedy and carries with it an original story. At points the film drags and it may be tough to get past the fact that it’s a piece of non-fiction, but nonetheless this film is enjoyable. At the least it’s amazing to learn the lengths to which the military will go in order to successfully combat its enemies.