Philadelphia Film Festival 2009

There’s just nothing as off-the-grid original on the cinema landscape this season as Grant Heslov’s first film as a director. Heslov brilliantly refashioned his burgeoning career as an actor by writing the script for Good Night and Good Luck with George Clooney. Now he moves front and center directing Clooney, who heads a cast that could be the Four Horsemen of the New Wave Apocalypse--Kevin Spacey, Jeff Bridges and Ewan McGregor. Arriving at the Toronto just days after it was hailed at Venice, The Men Who Stare at Goats takes aim squarely at the mindset of the post-Vietnam American military that has inexplicably gone all stiff upper lip 18th Century Redcoat in a guerilla 2Oth Century (now 21st) world. Based on Jon Ronson’s book (“More of this is true than you would believe,” the film begins), Goats enlists Clooney and Bridges as New Age US intelligence operatives in a top secret research unit dubbed the New Earth Army and run by Bridges, whose relationship to normal is paranormal and a whole lot closer to Wavy Gravy, Timothy Leary and Bugs Bunny than it ever is to General Westmoreland and the team who gave you the fall of Saigon. The New Age bunch was of such awesome spiritual prowess they could stare at goats till they dropped dead. It’s as if the story were a follow-up to Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, filmed by The Coen Boys, as The Men Who Stare at Goats takes off on an Iraqi road trip through a desert filled with pop-up horrors waiting to swallow them whole. It’s rollicking good fun, as it flips back and forth in time and seduces you along its wacky tour of schizophrenic American military culture. The film is finally curiously moving, as it articulates an anti-war vision of conflict resolution based on the karma of a better planet. In short, you’ll laugh till you transubstantiate. Hot from Toronto. --Harlan Jacobson.