A Dude-like Jeff Bridges (l) trains George Clooney in the art of psychic combat in The Men Who Stare at Goats

The Men Who Stare at Goats

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The U.S. government has never discounted the effectiveness of the absurd. Humiliating Fidel Castro by thinning his beard or using Barney & Friends to torture unco-operative prisoners might seem laughable, but that didn’t prevent them from being seriously considered and, in the case of the latter, executed. They’re absurdities with a sinister edge, which is why The Men Who Stare at Goats is able to turn something as loopy as a tale about would-be psychic soldiers into a manically funny but critically inflected comedy about fantasies and the Iraq War.

Based on Jon Ronson’s book of the same name, TMWSAG follows a local reporter named Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) who sets out during the first weeks of the second Iraq War to try to redeem himself after being left by his wife for his one-armed editor. In Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), another soul drinking at a Kuwaiti bar, Wilton finds the first clues about the truth behind the U.S. military’s New Earth Army — a hippie-inspired psychic unit formed by the eccentric Bill Django, played with Dude-like mellowness by Jeff Bridges. Cassaday’s claims of invisibility and remote travel seem implausible at first — and would probably continue to be if it weren’t for Wilton’s desperation — but soon the nebbish reporter and a clumsy Jedi are travelling across the Iraqi desert on a dubious psychic mission.

Where Ronson’s original book is a non-fiction exploration of the U.S. Army’s serious attempts to exploit the paranormal, Peter Straughan’s adapted screenplay adds a picaresque, desert-hopping buddy comedy punctuated by flashbacks to Django and his eccentric unit. While this occasionally leads to some very heavy themes being dealt with in light strokes, TMWSAG’s humour matches the absurdity of its real-life inspirations. Clooney is great as a delusional Jedi, and it doesn’t hurt that McGregor used to be one.

The movie takes pains to leave breadcrumbs for both doubters and true believers as to whether Cassady really has any powers, but it’s never unclear about the lengths that faith can compel a person to travel. Wilton is obviously the Sancho Panzo to Cassaday’s Don Quixote and both are pathologically driven to accept the only belief that gives their lives meaning. But when the worm turns in the final act, it becomes just as clear that those fantasies can do worse than die: They can be exploited. The ride across the desert is fun, but it also follows a clear arc — the U.S. has never let an absurd idea get in the way of a good war.