Goats Movie Review

Goats (2012)
Comedy

This quirky coming of age film, adapted from the novel by Mark Poirier, tells the story of Ellis (Graham Phillips), a 15-year-old boy leaving his non-traditional home in Tucson to attend the Gates Academy, a prep school on the East coast. The film, a Sundance Festival selection, was also one of nine chosen for the Sundance USA tour which dispatched the filmmakers to The Loft Cinema, Tucson’s own art film house. Exciting stuff, but what excited me most about seeing the film wasn’t its connection to Sundance or the opportunity to meet its writer, director, and producer—what I really couldn’t wait to see was how they represented my home town of Tucson.

Tucson, otherwise known as The Old Pueblo, has been my home since 1991. That’s when I left my job at the CBS Broadcast Center in New York, packed up my NYU Cinema Studies degree along with my husband, our two kittens, one lonely love bird, everything else we owned, and headed west. Nearly 2,500 miles later, we arrived in The Old Pueblo with the hopes that I could continue my efforts in filmmaking while also enjoying a quality of life that I just didn’t believe was possible in New York or L.A. Over time my dream of becoming a filmmaker slipped away, choosing instead the less rocky road called 9-to-5 employment. Meanwhile, Tucson has continued to shine in more than 80 films since 1990.

And shine it does in Goats. Thanks to the efforts of director Christopher Neil and cinematographer Wyatt Troll, Tucson takes on an almost ethereal quality. Whether beautiful, thorny, or weedy, the characters seem to be organically connected to their environment. They have sprouted in the desert much in the same way the wildflowers, agave, cacti, and buffelgrass have.

Like a tumbleweed lodged between the rugged desert from which it came and the guardrails to a freeway leading toward civilization, Ellis has reached the crossroads where a boy embarks on the path that will make him a man. His decision to leave his mother and their atypical lifestyle in Tucson for the Gates Academy where his estranged father is an alumnus signals his desire to get to know his father, and in essence learn more about himself. Not unlike most teen-aged boys in America today, he is confounded by his mother’s many eccentricities, lacks a meaningful relationship with his father, fantasizes about the girl next door, smokes a little pot, and wait for it… spends most of his free time with a couple of goats and their stoned, long-haired herder who’s become the best father figure he has. Okay, so maybe he’s not exactly like other teen-aged boys out there.

Ellis has lived with his mother Wendy (Vera Farmiga) since his parent’s divorce ten years prior. She is a wildflower—beautiful, fragile, and fleeting. Enabled by a healthy trust-fund, Wendy’s bursts of mothering are regularly interrupted by flaky self-indulged obsessions that leave little time for parenting but which attract parasitic buffelgrass boyfriends like Bennet (Justin Kirk) who see Ellis as nothing more than a rival for Wendy’s attention and money. This leaves most of the daily parenting responsibilities to their groundskeeper Javier, known as “Goat Man”. Played by a nearly unrecognizable David Duchovny, Goat Man lovingly tends the plants, the animals, and the people. He and Ellis, along with the goats, make treks into Tucson’s surrounding mountains where Goat Man extols his wandering philosophies to Ellis.  

Armed with those philosophies, and another kind of stash from Goat Man, Ellis arrives at Gates Academy feeling just a bit out of place. Nevertheless, Ellis acquires his father’s legacy and is expected to follow in his footsteps—almost literally. Having seen a glimpse of his father’s past, Ellis is curious to learn more. So, he and his misfit roommate Barney (Nicholas Lobue) make their way into Washington, DC where Ellis will spend the Thanksgiving holiday with his father Frank (Ty Burrell) and stepmother Judy (Keri Russell). Despite his best efforts Ellis ends up feeling even more misunderstood and out-of-place with Frank, Judy, and their baby-on-the-way.  

At this point Ellis desperately misses home, but when he finally does make it back to Tucson for Christmas break, it’s not the idealized home-sweet-home he remembered. The pieces don’t fit together any better there, either. Then, after Goat Man goes on a trek from which he doesn’t readily return, Ellis departs for school even more despondent, worried, and confused than before.

Back at school, Ellis begins to undergo the realization that sometimes in our minds, we unfairly make people and situations out to be whatever we need them to be. He needed to feel out of place at Gates, but discovers he’s actually fitting in just fine. He needed to believe he had nothing in common with his father, but realizes he’s naturally good at all the things his father was. He needed to believe his mother was flaky and weak, but figures out she’s really just eccentric and giving. He needed to believe that Goat Man was a wise leader when perhaps he’s just a cool dude. Yes, this tumbling tumbleweed is making it down the road to manhood just like he’s supposed to.

Born and raised in Tucson, Mark Poirier, the author of the novel also wrote the screenplay adaptation so he took care to present Tucson in a special way. In the same special way, he developed interesting, yet slightly stereotypical characters, that make you laugh, make you raise an eyebrow, maybe even make you cry. Frankly, they’re characters that you’re bound to encounter if you spend any time in Tucson.

I went to the screening anxious to see how the film treated my town, and I was quite pleased. It’s a quality film deserving of its selection at Sundance, as well as its purchase by Image Entertainment. Now we can hope that it will make it into wide distribution, so people all over the world will be able to enjoy a little bit of Tucson.