George Clooney (33 page)

Clooney's performance as Sergeant Lyn Cassady is sound enough, giving him some opportunity to indulge in some physical comedy and deliver some good one-liners, but his part as written does not really allow us to engage in and therefore care about him. Lyn first appears as a shadowy presence, in the dead space of the shot, apparently reading a newspaper but listening to Bob spin delusional lies to his ex-wife from a Kuwait hotel of what dangers he is in covering the war. As in
Confessions
, a delusional male, given to making up stories of exciting adventures, is drawn to a shadowy figure in U.S. intelligence, who may be a product of a fevered male imagination.

Heslov does a competent but unspectacular job of directing his first film. A bigger weakness is Peter Straughan's script. The narrative structure is basically that of a road movie, punctuated by flashbacks to provide Lyn's backstory. However, the surface narrative in the desert lacks both a goal and a motive, making it hard to care about what happens to Lyn and Bob. They experience a series of events, but arguably these might happen in any order and we are left to wait for the next flashback with its
succession of examples of the craziness of the notion of psychic spies. The plot includes a couple of very unlikely consequences: not just Bob sitting right next to the very man that Lacey spoke about, but at the end Bob and Lyn stumble upon a secret base, housing former New Earth Army personnel and a warehouse of goats used for aggressive applications of psychic forces.

A number of features, which in isolation might make an effective comedy or satire, in combination seem to fight against one another: the absurd situations (from Hopwood's opening running into a wall), the juxtaposition of lighthearted music with serious visuals (“Alright” by Supergrass accompanies the title sequence as Bob prepares to go to war, or Boston's “More Than a Feeling” to help Lyn's remote viewing), but most damaging of all is the language. The steady stream of quips and one-liners makes deep emotional engagement difficult. As Lyn becomes more serious and appears broken in the final phase of the film, he retells the experience of killing a goat by staring, for which he feels cursed, but Bob's only reaction is to describe it as “the silence of the goats.”

From the outset, the New Earth Army and their capabilities are described using the specific language of
Star Wars
(George Lucas, 1977). Those with psychic powers are “Jedi Warriors” battling the powers of evil. As Bob says of Lyn's extraordinary abilities, “The Force truly was strong with this one.” A further layer of self-awareness is added by the casting of Ewan McGregor, the face of a young Obi-Wan Kenobi in the first three films of the trilogy. Thus when Bob is watching TV and we hear a presenter talk of a farm boy who would grow up to be involved in the battle of good and evil, the subsequent cut to a shot of George Bush, rather than Luke Skywalker, is an effective visual gag. When Lyn and Bob struggle across the desert, it is hard not to be reminded of similar treks with the Droids; and Lyn tries the technique used by Obi-Wan Kenobi to evade stormtrooper patrols by making them repeat his suggestions, but his attempt at repeating “You don't want us” to his captors has no effect at all.

Lyn is a laughable figure. His ridiculous martial arts stance when he first challenges Bob, his “sparkly eyes technique,” which appears to involve little more than staring, and the so-called “Echmeyer Technique,” a diving attack using flailing knives, rendered absurd by him being unarmed when he dives on an Iraqi captor, all undermine his status. He talks of abilities like invisibility but does not demonstrate that, and claims a high level of intuition before driving the wrong way at a crossroads and hitting a roadside bomb. Lyn casts himself as a cursed figure, having received the “Dim Mak” or mark of death from Larry (Kevin Spacey), but a shift into a more morose and inward-looking phase of his character is undercut by the
language used to describe it (“like the poem where the guy kills a seagull”). Supposedly, he has cancer (motivating the shot of him injecting an unexplained drug) but he attributes this disease to Larry's malign influence.

One of the few clear demonstrations of Lyn's ability is “cloudbursting,” causing clouds to disperse, which appears to work, but when he takes his eyes off the road, he and Bob crash into a boulder. He claims to be on a mission but Bob just declares, “You're an idiot.” Lyn is able to predict coin tosses but his combat skills, supposedly based on psychic powers, involve throwing Bob to the ground and then claiming “I barely moved.” He lectures Bob on not giving into fear with gnomic utterances that are revealed to derive from Oprah. It is the death of a goat, apparently caused by Bob's stare, that is the clearest suggestion of substantial psychic powers. He is asked to help locate a kidnapped NATO general, and his subsequent honoring by the group, being awarded a symbolic feather, suggests his help is useful. However, later Lyn feels unworthy and returns the feather, and Bill (Jeff Bridges) admits to Bob “None of it was real” and that the feather came from a turkey. Beyond Lyn, it is also unclear what abilities the group has. We see a blindfolded driver in a jeep plowing through cones, forcing soldiers to dive out of the way, and later, asked where General Noriega is, another member of the group replies, “Ask Angela Lansbury.”

Bridges does what he can with his character of Bill Janko but he is little more than a hippy cliché given some good one-liners, allowing him to rerun elements of the Dude from
The Big Lebowski
(Coen brothers, 1998). He is court-martialed and stands to object “That's a lie” about misusing funds but has to qualify his second objection when accused of using money for drugs and a prostitute (“Well, the hooker thing is definitely a lie”). Kevin Spacey as Larry Hooper also has little to do here. He appears, overtly described by Bob's voice-over as “a serpent” entering the Eden-like existence of Bill's New Earth Army. Larry is closer to a playground bully, predicting disaster at a colleague's wedding and faking possession by a spirit. He is more interested in aggressive applications of the program. We never learn why, making his character closer to Spacey's incarnation as cartoonish Lex Luthor in
Superman Returns
(Bryan Singer, 2006).

There are also overtones of
Forrest Gump
(Robert Zemeckis, 1994) here. Personal developments (Bob's wife leaving him) and events in American history, like Vietnam and especially the 1960s/1970s drug counterculture (hot-tub sex, drug use, and even colonic irrigation), seem to whip past with little sense of their significance. Like Gump's mother, Bob tells Lyn to “find out what your destiny is,” and the course of both narratives
follows a central character on a personal quest. Bob admits later that he joins Lyn on his mission in Iraq because he was really looking for “something to believe in.” Earlier Bob states, “Sometimes there's a need … Sometimes people are calling out for something” even if “they don't know it themselves,” reminiscent of the runners who follow Gump, jogging across America, thinking they have found a messiah. Whereas Gump is freed from his braces by dancing like Elvis, Lyn as a boy is told not to dance to the Swinging Blue Jeans' “Hippy Hippy Shake” by his father who does not want him to “look queer.” Lyn is liberated under the encouragement of Bill, some hallucinogenic drugs, and Billy Idol's “Dancing with Myself” to engage in more uninhibited dancing.

There are glimpses of a darker vision with the kidnapping of Bob and Lyn, in the insensitive, aggressive capitalism of Blackwater-style contractor Todd Nixon (Robert Patrick), and most clearly in the abusive techniques being pursued by Larry, experimenting on a raw recruit, to the point where the man runs onto a parade ground, naked with a gun, and shoots himself. However, even a detainee undergoing sleep-depriving light patterns, reminiscent of abuses, either alleged or proven, at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo, it is still described by Lyn in the same
Star Wars
phraseology, saying he has seen “the Dark Side.” The film tells us nothing about the conflict itself. The sole Iraqi given a name, Mahmud (Waleed Zuaiter), is nearly run over by Lyn, has his house robbed, his wife vanishes, and is prepared to give Bob and Lyn his car, even though he is still repeatedly called Mohammed by everyone.

It is usually assumed that the film takes little except its title from the book but that is not true. Jon Ronson's book is comprised of a series of interviews with soldiers of varying rank who claim to have been involved in some measure with the development of psychic spying for U.S. intelligence. We find in both the quirkier experiments in psychic spying conducted at Fort Bragg, like the existence of a goat lab and the development of a death touch, the “sparkly eyes” technique, and the use of the recruiting slogan “to be all you can be,” and both begin with a general trying to run through an office wall, albeit Straughan changes the name from Stubblebine to Hopwood.
⁹
Name changes include the book's Jim Cannon who becomes Bill Django, complete with revelatory experience in Vietnam and author of the First Earth Battalion Operations Manual. Other names are changed only slightly, so that a psychic who develops a knife-wielding technique is changed from Echanis to Eckmeyer. Elsewhere, Straughan appropriates exchanges almost wholesale, like the “Jedi Warrior” scene, originally spoken by an interviewee, former psychic spy Glenn Wheaton, but transposed into Lyn's dialogue. Indeed,
Clooney's character is a composite of a number of interviewees in Ronson's book: Guy Savelli (who runs a dance studio), martial arts instructor Pete Brusso (who demonstrates choke holds and how to interrupt thought patterns), Sergeant Lyn Buchanan, and Stubblebine, who describes being able to cloudburst while driving.
¹⁰
There are differences too. The book makes specific mention of Uri Geller who claims that he was recruited to help U.S. intelligence, the Waco siege, and the training of the 9/11 terrorists. However, the substance of Straughan's script is much closer to the book than has been noted, including all the Star Wars vocabulary and the talk of “Jedi warriors.”
¹¹

By the close, it is debatable whether we have learned any more about the characters than we knew at the beginning. Bob especially is a very flat narrative device, asking questions on behalf of the viewer so that another example of psychic spying can be explained. Bob asks Bill, “Do you believe in redemption?” but the narrative closes not on a rendition of the Earth Army's hippy prayer but a frat house prank of putting LSD in the powdered eggs of the base. Out of context, shots of stoned soldiers giving each other flowers and driving tanks around are funny and it is tempting to think that a more liberal attitude to drugs and releasing some prisoners, heavily symbolized by the liberated goats, will somehow make everything all right, but the notion that this provides any kind of solution to the issues that the film only barely touches on is unconvincing. It is a film with effective moments, but
Confessions
was held together by a powerful schizoid performance by Sam Rockwell. Clooney's part is not substantial enough to know how much sympathy he deserves. Perhaps it ultimately comes down to a more simple issue: we might believe that it is possible but unlikely that Barris killed 33 people but we lack empirical proof that Lyn could achieve something impossible according to the laws of physics as we know them.

The book ends on a downbeat note in which interviewees fail to return Ronson's calls, but the film's final scene seems out of synch with the ironic tone of the rest of the film. Bob is annoyed that his report has been airbrushed into a comedic piece on Barney's theme tune. However, this is effectively what the whole film does with its potentially serious subject matter. What is presumably intended as a rallying call for more crusading journalism at the close actually has the opposite effect. McGregor's self-aware declaration, “Now more than ever we need the Jedi,” would be more powerful if similar references had not been used throughout, implying the only hope is the intervention of a fictitious species. Bob ends the film as he began it, indulging in delusional wish fulfillment.

Bob Baer talks of the danger that the necessary identification with one's enemy develops to such an extreme that “I was starting to think like the people I was after.”
¹²
Lyn Cassady, Bob Barnes, and Harry Pfarrer all share an intense, emotional identification with a problem, at the expense of the bigger picture (in Baer's case of the 1983 U.S. embassy bombing in Beirut), allowing viewers to identify with a fallible character but also feel possibly slightly superior to them, imagining perhaps that we might have remained more objective.

In Clooney's movies of the last decade, antagonists are often part of a more complex worldview, which might involve shady business in the Middle East (
Syriana
) or legal bodies suppressing information about environmental issues (
Michael Clayton
), or remain largely undefined and possibly only in the imagination of the protagonist (
Confessions
). As in
Burn after Reading
, there is less focus on the job itself and more on individuals, particularly those frustrated with superiors who act from financial and political motives (an element traceable back to his character in
ER
). Even
The Man from Uncle
from which Clooney ultimately dropped out is an entirely logical project for his star persona, offering as it does a blend of the suave and stylish with more surreal cloak-and-dagger elements of espionage.

Solaris
gave Clooney the chance to work again with Soderbergh in a genre that neither had yet tried, as well as representing the challenge of a remake of a classic text twice over (from Andrei Tarkovsky's landmark science fiction film from 1972, itself an adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's influential short novel from 1961).