Can the human mind be used as a weapon of war? It would be cheaper than a pilotless drone, for one thing, though not necessarily smarter. Those who wish to pursue this exciting possibility are advised to see “The Men Who Stare at Goats,” which is based on a book by the British journalist Jon Ronson. What Ronson discovered, in his researches, was a section of the United States military that was solely and specifically tasked with mental combat. “More of this is true than you would believe,” an opening title declares. What a tease.
Our Ronson-like protagonist is an American reporter named Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor). He works in Ann Arbor, but craves a wider beat; the craving takes him to Iraq, or, at any rate, to a Kuwaiti hotel. There he meets Lyn Cassidy (George Clooney), who claims to be one of the Jedi Warriors, men who stared at goats until they—the goats, that is, not the men—fell down dead. (“What’s a Jedi warrior?” Wilton asks. So that’s why McGregor was hired: for the sake of an in-joke.) Staring was just one of the indispensable skills that were drilled into Cassidy and his comrades, years before, by Bill Django (Jeff Bridges), who vowed, “We must become the first superpower to develop super powers.” Django was a ponytailed visionary—if that’s not a tautology—who, following an epiphany in Vietnam, founded the New Earth Army, in order to establish whether love and peace can win wars. The answer is “They can’t,” but that didn’t stop his recruits from trying to run through walls, or the government from sponsoring the program.
Most of these training sessions are viewed in flashback. The film’s director, Grant Heslov, flips constantly between the Django regime and the recent situation in Iraq, as Cassidy—who says he has been reactivated—crosses the border, with Wilton in tow, on a mission too secret to be revealed. If Heslov and his screenwriter, Peter Straughan, prefer to linger on the early days of the unit, it’s because that is where the action is, or was. Hence the quick, perfect scene in which an ambitious psychic named Hooper (Kevin Spacey) congratulates the happy couple at a wedding reception, and adds, “Sorry it doesn’t work out between you two.”
At moments like this, the movie feels rich in satisfactions. To watch actors as nimble as Bridges, Clooney, and Spacey clashing wits as if they were lightsabers is precisely the kind of fun—grownup fun, delivered by men, not kids, and lit not by special effects but by a serious love of the joust—that I demand from Hollywood and, for the most part, no longer get. Each man vies to be the most deadpan, determined to present his character, a solemn clairvoyant fruitcake, as nuttier than the rest. Clooney is probably the winner here, even turning to McGregor and wielding the famous “sparkly eyes” technique, as taught to super-spies, without a smirk. The most handsome and capable star in the world, and he doesn’t mind coming across as a total dork. It’s not fair.
It’s also not fair that the movie lets him down. Clooney gives it everything, but what does he get in return? A void where the story is meant to be. For a while, everything ambles along like a mashup of “Three Kings,” the 1999 Clooney film about the first Gulf War, and the Three Stooges, with Heslov dishing out roof tumbles, car smashes, and cheek slaps. Much of this is neatly framed—an eye poke, for some reason, is funnier in long shot—and you sit there for an hour, in good humor, waiting for the narrative to stop noodling around and get going, only to realize, to your consternation, that it’s winding down. In truth, there just isn’t enough motion here to sustain a motion picture. The material is a gift: Considering the mileage that Robin Williams got out of “military intelligence” for his radio riffs in “Good Morning, Vietnam,” you can imagine the glee with which he would have feasted on the news of psychic soldiering. As for Joseph Heller, it’s only the thought that some targets are just too pitifully easy that might have restrained his hand. In both cases, however, the Jedis would surely have supplied no more than a telling subplot, or a skit. After all, it’s not as if they ever achieved anything.
Late in the day, efforts are made to knock up a makeshift finale. In a covert facility in the desert, Wilton and Cassidy, the logic of whose actions is roughly half of that allotted to Hope and Crosby in “Road to Morocco,” stumble upon Django and other figures from the past. We get a communal acid trip—always a clear sign of a movie with nowhere to go—followed by pounding volleys of rock music, as a herd of goats, which have been shot at rather than merely stared at, are set free, together with a cluster of orange-suited enemy prisoners, who have been tortured. This sideways glance at a deeply uncomical and still potent issue is one hell of a misstep on Heslov’s part. Having urged us to take nothing seriously throughout, how can he expect us to switch, for a couple of minutes, to a thoughtful and disapproving frown? What is this, “Road to Guantánamo”? Safely back in America, Wilton pledges to “tell everybody what happened.” But that’s the problem, Bob. Nothing did.
Please make sure, when you buy a ticket for “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire,” to pronounce the title in full. I know you will. There was a plan to call it “Push,” until another movie got there first. But why not call the new one “Precious,” and leave it at that? After all, Deborah Kerr didn’t star in “The Innocents: Based on the Novella ‘The Turn of the Screw’ by Henry James,” and Dustin Hoffman didn’t star in “Rain Man: Based on the Overwhelming Desire to Win an Academy Award by Dustin Hoffman,” so why the change in rubric?
The heroine is Clareece Jones (Gabourey Sidibe), a Harlem teen-ager better known as Precious. She is grimly overweight, her face so filled out that the play of normal expression seems restricted; yet Sidibe does wonders with that sad limitation, and we learn to spot the flare of anger in her eyes. She has much to be angry about: aged sixteen, she already has one child, who has Down syndrome, and is carrying another. The father is her own father, who later turns out to be H.I.V. positive. We are forced to watch as she is violated in livid closeup, complete with squeaking bedsprings, a belt being unbuckled above a sweating belly, and—lest the seething aggression of the rape escape us—a shot of eggs sizzling in grease. If the subject were not so grave, you would be tempted to laugh at this desperate overkill of detail. Does the director, Lee Daniels, not realize how such industrial-strength images tend to weaken, rather than fortify, the moral case?
Expelled for being pregnant, Precious seeks alternative schooling at Each One Teach One, a local program for those undesired elsewhere. Her classmates, especially Jo Ann (Xosha Roquemore), whose favorite color is “fluorescent beige,” and Rhonda (Chyna Layne), with her fabulously broad Jamaican accent, are the most naturally uplifting people in the film—far more so than their teacher, Blu Rain (Paula Patton), whose powers of uplift feel like make-believe. She is a vision of tolerant gentleness, who wears a new set of soft fabrics every day and plays Scrabble in the evening with her equally lovely lesbian partner. “They talk like TV stations I don’t watch,” Precious says, but that tart line is not borne out by the film, which drinks in Ms. Rain without demur. The same goes for the fantasy sequences—hugely ill-advised dream clips, showing a richly clad Precious at a movie première or slow-dancing with a hunk. One of them even finds a slender white girl gazing back at her from the bedroom mirror. What we have here is a fouled-up fairy tale of oppression and empowerment, and it’s hard not to be ensnared by its mixture of rank maleficence and easy reverie. The gap between being genuinely stirred and having your arm twisted, however, is narrower than we care to admit.
What rescues “Precious” is the performance of Mo’Nique as Mary, the heroine’s Medusa-like mother. Given her range of leisure interests—smoking, cursing, channel surfing, baby tossing, munching pigs’ feet, and throwing televisions down the stairs—there is no reason that the character should be more than a vicious cartoon. But Mo’Nique gives tremendous life to this dead soul, makes you wonder where her own misery sprouted from, and closes the proceedings with a monologue of selfishness so storm-driven that for a second, despite ourselves, we are almost swept away. Sitting opposite during this tempest is a social worker, Mrs. Weiss (Mariah Carey). Hold on: a stern, song-free, compassionate piece of acting from Mariah Carey? That sounds like one of Precious’s fantasies, but it’s for real. ♦