Fantastic Fest Review: The Men Who Stare at Goats

War, as they say, is hell. So what's to be said of peace, of employing any and all means necessary to avert violence instead of propagating it? If The Men Who Stare at Goats is to believed, the forces of peace are crazy and covert and even at war with themselves, and if fellow Fantastic Fest attendees are to believed, it's at best a loose adaptation of journalist Jon Ronson's truly remarkable true-life tale.

After all, Ronson from Wales is now Bob Wilton from Ann Arbor (as played by Scotland's own Ewan McGregor), a journalist newly keen on covering the Iraq invasion after a cheating missus robs him of a purpose and a place to call his own. While waiting in Kuwait for a story, any story, he bumps into Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), who is not the contractor he says to be, but rather a man on a mission, and sensing a story, any story, Wilton decides to tag along...

Cassady is a self-assured "American Jedi," part of an elite Army unit established in the wake of Vietnam to explore non-lethal psychic tactics with which to win wars. Leading the cause was Bill Django (Jeff Bridges), who keeps finding new and unorthodox ways to spend taxpayers' money on finding new and unorthodox ways to infiltrate the enemy, and eventually fighting the good fight better than anyone else in the battalion -- much to the chagrin of one Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey) -- was Cassady himself.

But now? He's an American wandering around in a figurative and literal desert, empowered by intelligence that he doesn't quite have and eager to string along a more naive American who's all too willing to follow. Thankfully, Peter Straughan's screenplay doesn't drive that point too hard, opting instead for a nearly apolitical farce where Clooney's combination of wide-eyed lunacy and steely-eyed conviction mesh nicely, and where Spacey is asked to be stern (for a change), and where Bridges is asked to be quite Dude-like in his hippie-dippie demeanor.

And McGregor? He's just a perfectly adequate vessel for our own initial skepticism and eventual frustration, saddled with an equally adequate American accent (and although I've heard that his casting and his character's chronic ignorance of all things Jedi was genuinely a coincidence, I find it hard to believe that no one stood on set and thought that might get a bit old as a joke, however intentional or not it may have been).

Director Grant Heslov (Clooney's co-writer on Good Night, and Good Luck.) is similarly on point with Straughan when it comes to actively avoiding a point, content with connecting some very peculiar scenarios (i.e. the death of a goat with a stare, or an Army-sanctioned dance party for men in uniform) and taking whatever liberties necessary to do so. Goats is an unpredictable movie, and a fairly amusing one at that, but when the lights come up, it's hard not to think: what is it good for?

(The version shown at Fantastic Fest was a work-in-progress, lacking closing credits and color correction among other minor audio/visual factors. As such, I'm reluctant to fully judge Robert Elswit's usually remarkable cinematography or other technical aspects of the film.)