“Silence of the Goats”. With an excellent play on words, Ewan MacGregor makes a joke about one of the scariest movies of all time. He also sums up the goal of Jon Ronson’s book, “The Men Who Stare at Goats” and the new film adaptation of the same name: to make a clever mockery of serious events. It’s too bad, then, that films have to have more than one line– if the rest of the “Goats” was as simple as MacGregor’s one-liner, it would have been an excellent movie. Unfortunately, the movie is not simple at all.
It starts out simply enough. Bob Wilton (MacGregor) is a naive journalist who pursues glory in modern-day Iraq after his wife divorces him. Before he gets there, however, he meets Lyn Cassady (George Clooney) who says he is on a mission for a special unit of psychic soldiers called the Jedi. Wilton joins him on this mission. Nothing too complicated yet. It’s only after the two set off on their mission that things get weird.
At first, the weirdness is good. Cassady, a sligtly deranged, but worldly wise, man contrasts with Wilton, an uptight, black-and-white skeptic; and, for the first half of the movie, there are a number of hilarious sequences centered around the two men. They discuss classic rock. Cassady stabs Wilton several times with a piece of plastic called “The Punisher”, to prove a point. Everything is fun and games.
Then, the movie moves on to the meat of the plot, and everything goes sour. Here, the filmmakers try– and fail– to use a complicate web of flashbacks and an variety of useless symbols to explain the remainder of the plot, and to explore the themes of the movie. The titular goats are a perfect indicator of this. They are introduced (through a flashback) 70 minutes into the 90-minute movie; and, though they are meant to be key symbols of the brutality of government operations, they prove to be little more than another gag. Every aspect of the second half of the movie feels forced, as if the filmmakers, namely screenwriter Peter Vaughan, just stopped trying. Given the excellence of the first half of the movie, and the valid anti-war themes behind the chaos, it is sad to see “Goats” break down into such a mess of a film.
Yes, there’s a lot to love about “Goats”. The first half provides a lot of laughs, and the thematic material is thought-provoking at times. But given the subject matter, and the talented actors behind it (Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey give MacGregor and Clooney some much-needed support), it should have been– could have been– much better. With some more effort from the folks behind the camera, it would have been much better. Maybe if the movie “The Men Who Stare At Goats 2: Silence Of The Goats” is made, it will be an Academy-Award-winning masterpiece of black comedy. But, until then, movie goers will have to
