Cinema Nova, 15/03/2010
Status: Don’t need to be a psychic to know that I’m behind.
When GEORGE CLOONEY tells EWAN McGREGOR (playing a character based on investigative journalist Jon Ronson) he’s trained with a special branch of the US military as a Jedi warrior, it felt weird that McGregor didn’t know what a Jedi was. He played Obi-Wan Kenobi in recent Star Wars movies for Frank’s sake! Did the casting agent not know that? Has the director never seen The Phantom Menace? (I’d buy it if he didn’t see Episodes 2 and 3, but Episode 1? Even my nana saw that one). Sure, McGregor doesn’t have the stoopid haircut and bitchin weaponry, but he does have the same, slightly dopey face.
Although I’ve not read Ronson’s book, on which the screenplay is based, it’s pretty easy to tell the bits that veer off the source material. The ending, for example is just plain silly, even for all that has come before it. And what comes before it is pretty strange indeed. After Vietnam, the US Army trained soldiers in Project Jedi to develop telepathy, invisibility, astral projection and to practise peace and love rather than war and hatred. Except for Lyn Cassady (Clooney), this unit of Jedi pacifist psychics is an unmitigated failure. That doesn’t really stop the funding, though and the unit continues right up to the current war in Iraq (albeit as a contacted private operator staffed pretty much the same dishonourably discharged soldiers from Project Jedi).
It’d all be too much to swallow but for a) knowing it was completely (mostly) true and b) the absolutely deadpan delivery of, in particular Clooney and KEVIN SPACEY (who, by the way, we don’t see nearly enough of these days). Despite the deadpan, or maybe because of it, parts of this film are very very funny. Mostly, though (like a lot of fictionalised adaptations of non-fiction source material), it made me head straight to my local library and borrow out Ronson’s book. I suspect reading the book I’m less likely to confuse Ronson for Obi-Wan Kenobi - bonus!
