Screen Scene: The Men Who Stare at Goats

A few decades ago, a small unit of the U.S. military was dedicated to New Age and paranormal approaches to war. The men in this unit, known as “warrior monks,” attempted to turn themselves invisible, see into the future and walk through walls. They stared at goats, trying to kill them with their minds. No, seriously. That actually happened.

The general public was unaware of this, of course, until 2004, when journalist Jon Ronson wrote “The Men Who Stare at Goats,” a thoroughly researched account of one of the strangest stories in modern military history. The book caught the eye of a producer, Paul Lister, who enlisted screenwriter Peter Straughan, producer-turned-director Grant Heslov and Heslov’s business partner, one George Clooney.

Straughan tinkered with the story quite a bit, consolidating and renaming characters and packaging the story as something of a buddy comedy. His biggest slip was changing the unit’s title from the First Earth Battalion to the far less interesting New Earth Army, but he left the madcap spirit of Ronson’s journalism very much intact. The film opens with the perfect disclaimer: “More of this is true than you would believe.”

Bob Wilton ““ played by Ewan McGregor, looking slim and inquisitive ““ is Ronson’s heavily fictionalized alter ego, a writer for a small Ann Arbor, Mich., newspaper whose wife has just left him for his editor. The Second Gulf War is in full bloom, so Winston heads to Iraq to prove his manliness and develop his reporting skills. Instead, he finds Lyn Cassady (Clooney, who also produced), who claims that when he walks into a room, he instantly knows how many electrical outlets there are, thanks to a technique he learned as a soldier in the New Earth Army. And that was just Level One.

The two men embark on a totally ridiculous and frequently hilarious journey through the Iraqi desert, interrupted regularly by flashbacks to Cassady’s army days, when he trained under the visionary tutelage of New Earth Army founder Bill Django (Jeff Bridges). Along the way, Wilton and Cassady develop a weird kind of friendship, fight off terrorists and follow a goat to safety.

The main draw for the film is the A-list ensemble cast, and with good reason. Clooney has learned a thing or two about oddball comedy from the Coen brothers, and he tones down the twitches and affectations he relied on in “Burn After Reading” and “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” enough to make Cassady as endearingly zealous as he is completely nuts.

Somehow, McGregor, who’s Scottish, was cast as Wilton, who’s American and based on Ronson, who’s British, but he gets as many laughs as any of his Oscar-nominated co-stars. He’s appropriately intrigued by a subject as fascinating as Cassady, and all the right kinds of freaked out when Cassady suggests that they telepathically convince a group of gunmen not to shoot them.

The consistently magnificent Kevin Spacey demands a disproportionate amount of attention with his few scenes as Larry Hooper, a moustached killjoy who brings down the New Earth Army from the inside, though he doesn’t seem to be having nearly as much fun as he did playing Lex Luther in “Superman Returns.” And Bridges is reliably wacky, playing Django like The Dude reimagined as a flower child.

There are plenty of sight gags and endlessly quotable lines, but “The Men Who Stare at Goats” is mainly funny for the same reason “Ghostbusters” is: It’s a story about people who believe quite seriously in complete and utter absurdity. The fact that it was inspired by a true story makes it that much funnier, and a whole lot scarier.

One of the film’s best jokes comes right at the end, when Wilton returns to Michigan and writes the account of his adventures with Cassady. His story is almost completely ignored, and Wilton goes back to his life as a low-end journalist. It’s a great inversion of that tired convention of ending a tale with the narrator beginning to tell it; Ronson’s book actually made best-seller lists, and, indeed, inspired this movie. And what a fantastically silly movie it is.

E-mail Goodman at [email protected].