It was obviously set up to be funny, more so than I had actually been expecting. Because there are themes to the film that I think are... well, pretty fucking important, actually. I mean, the central idea to the movie is that soldiers, of any nation, are not being allowed to live up to their potential. Bridges talks about the need to create a force of "warrior-monks", a cadre of people who employ unconventional battlefield tactics such as a fierce love of peace, generosity of spirit, compassion, empathy, and the finely-honed ability to fall in love with anyone, instantly, given the need.
The antagonist of the movie is the desire on the part of other characters to use this spiritual power for the same old bullshit motives, government contracts and and personal gain. (One of the best parts of the movie came from a crew-cutted Halliburton-like dickhead and his entourage of armed goons, who displayed rampant fear of attack and itchy trigger-fingers-- not from enemy combatants, but from rival American contractor companies. Watching identical mercs in polo shirts, sniping at each other from behind Chevy Tahoes, over who was going to be the first to build a Starbucks in Baghdad, was about as close as the film got to a Joseph Heller-like sense of true venom and bite-- Milo Minderbinder in Iraq.) Kevin Spacey played the main creep, and the man's such a good actor that he could basically show up and fiddle with his watch for a half-hour and be enthralling. (Sadly, the movie doesn't give him a chance to exert himself much past this).
Like I said, it's funny. But it also sort of twinges something inside you, or at least it did me. Watching George Clooney wander around, sure of himself on some strange level, while simultaneously stumbling into blockheaded moves and acting irrationally, seemed to draw some parallel to all the people I've ever run into who had something to teach me. Or even myself, at my most open. I mean, have you ever felt like you were a singular entity, shaped of some potent material, ready to channel a cosmic necessity, and then you locked your keys inside your car? But it didn't really matter, because that shit just happens and you have to be bigger than that. And the movie drew a pretty fine line between Clooney just being full of hot air, and showing flashes of something that indeed make him a little more than ordinary. There's one scene where he and Ewan McGregor are sitting besides a busted car, waiting for help. Ewan McGregor's flipping a coin out of boredom, and Clooney's calling heads or tails, three or four times in a row, right each time.
"What's your record for this?" McGregor asks.
"Two hundred and forty-six. Tails," responds Clooney, who is of course right again.
It's a small moment, and there are several like it, but it's pretty significant in its impact. For all of Clooney's foibles, he's right just often enough for you to wonder. If you'll forgive me a pretty big stretch, it's a lot like religion. From what I've seen (and lived), most of it is puff and blow, a lot of entrenched cultural hokum. But there's also little kernels of truth in it, the underlying kind of thinking that can get our collective heads out of our collective asses. So yeah, it's funny to watch Jeff Bridges telling a hand-picked group of military recruits that their first official assignment is to dance to Billy Idol. There's a lot in the movie that's worth a good hoot and snicker. But when I stop to consider the idea of teachers, of governments invested in training people to emit light... I mean, Christ, couldn't we use more of that?
In other news, I need a decompression chamber of a kind that hasn't been invented yet. I often think that if I ever have to truly detox from a chemical substance, I'll have had some good practice beforehand. It's a paradox: abstention is a kind of immersion.
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