“MORE OF THIS is true than you would believe,” reads a
disclaimer at the beginning of The Men Who Stare at Goats. Maybe
I’m a sucker, or maybe I’ve been conditioned by too many
science-fiction movies, or maybe my level of faith in the US government
is so miniscule that I’ll believe just about anything about it,
but honestly, I didn’t have much trouble believing most of the
ridiculous stuff in Goats, a film that details the ostensibly
true story of American soldiers who trained to become “psychic spies”
in the 1980s. Calling themselves “Jedi warriors,” the men recruited
into “Project Jedi” are trained by Bill Django (Jeff Bridges), a
Vietnam vet-turned-New Age guru who’s tasked by Brigadier General Dean
Hopgood (Stephen Lang) with building the “New Earth Army.” He does this
by making them avoid solid foods, walk over hot coals, and dance to
Billy Idol’s “Dancing with Myself”; the goal, naturally, is to learn to
phase in and out of existence, become invisible, and telepathically
stop goats’ hearts.
Among these “warrior monks” are the skilled Lyn Cassady (George
Clooney), who’s able to get particularly into the psychic zone while
listening to Boston’s “More Than a Feeling,” and Larry Hooper (Kevin
Spacey), a smarmy shit who lacks Cassady’s talents but makes up for it
in malicious ambition.
In Goats, much of the story of Project Jedi—from its
supposed origins in the ’80s to its more recent supposed uses in
Iraq—is told via Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor), a small-time
reporter who stumbles upon Cassady in Kuwait. As the beleaguered,
flustered Wilton tags along on a top-secret mission in Iraq, Cassady
unfurls the secret history of Project Jedi—a ludicrous, rambling
tale crammed with copious amounts of New Age gibberish, backstabbing,
run-ins with military protocol, and LSD.
Inspired by Jon Ronson’s 2004 book about the US Army’s experiments
with the paranormal, Goats works best in its flashbacks, which
are weird and hilarious; Clooney, Spacey, Bridges, and Lang all seem to
be having a blast. In the modern-day sequences—which consist of a
possibly insane Cassady dragging a whining Wilton through the
desert—Goats loses much of its goofy, satirical edge, but
director Grant Heslov never totally strays from the film’s
outlandish-but-weirdly-believable tone, which, at its best, recalls
Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket and Dr. Strangelove.
The Men Who Stare at Goats isn’t nearly as good as either of
those films, but Heslov’s goals seem somewhat the same as Kubrick’s:
Throw all sorts of preposterous allegations at those in power, and then
step back, content and happy and pleased with how many of those
allegations, in context, don’t seem quite as ridiculous as they did
before.
