MOVIE REVIEW: ‘The Men Who Stare at Goats’

“The Men Who Stare at Goats,” a black comedy revolving around a (largely fictionalized) unit of the U.S. Army that hoped to harness psychic powers, meanders aimlessly without ever reaching a satisfying conclusion.

But the film’s biggest problem isn’t a lack of narrative focus; it’s a lack of moral courage.

Disillusioned with his home life, journalist Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) ships out to Iraq in 2003 to find danger and excitement; he dreams of proving his mettle and coming home with Pulitzer-worthy material. Waiting to cross the border from Kuwait into Iraq, Bob stumbles across Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), a former soldier who Bob has been told possesses psychic powers.

Lyn allows Bob to follow him into Iraq and blow the lid off the military’s work with psychic assassins (or, as Lyn calls them, “Jedi Warriors”). What follows is a narrative that weaves together Lyn and Bob’s Iraqi journey in 2003 and the evolution of the New Earth Army throughout the 1980s.

The scenes tracking the evolution of the New Age-y New Earth Army are the highlights of this picture: Under the command of Bill Django (Jeff Bridges), a squadron of soldiers is taught to free their minds and harness their latent psychic powers in order to become a less-lethal-but-more-effective force. Their hippie-dippy, unorthodox activities are both amusing and absurd.

Amusing and absurd isn’t enough, however. As “Goats” progresses, one becomes more and more aware that there’s little in the way of plot.

It’s hard to tell what mission Lyn is on, exactly, or what Bob will accomplish by sticking with him. Each vignette might inspire a few giggles but does little to move the story toward any sort of resolution.

The problem comes to a head at the end, when it is revealed just what Bob’s purpose is: He is there to chronicle Abu Ghraib-style abuses by the psy-ops soldiers and use his journalistic bona fides to spread the truth. Yet director Grant Heslov and writer Peter Straughan dance around this point, rushing through the revelation and its aftermath; they seem to realize that audiences are less interested in a critique of detainee treatment than in a Coenesque farce.

Their business sense might be right on (films about the Iraq war’s excesses have uniformly died at the box office) but it feels like a cop-out. Instead of owning their critique of the military and the war, Mr. Straughan and Mr. Heslov distance themselves from the uglier aspects of the conflict, and the result is a rudderless, bloodless movie that doesn’t quite know what it is.

★★
TITLE: “The Men Who Stare at Goats”
RATING: R (language, some drug content and brief nudity)
CREDITS: Directed by Grant Heslov, written by Peter Straughan
RUNNING TIME: 93 minutes
WEB SITE: http://www.themenwhostareatgoatsmovie.com/
MAXIMUM RATING: FOUR STARS