Role in 'Goats' recalls Dude from 'Lebowski'
By Steven Rea
The Philadelphia Inquirer
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 11.08.2009
TORONTO — In "The Men Who Stare at Goats," Jeff Bridges plays Bill Django, a military man who returns from Vietnam to embrace the '60s counterculture headlong — the whole Aquarian Age, flower power, altered states of consciousness thing.
But rather than drop out of the Army, Django is allowed to train a new squad of men: a group of would-be warrior monks who employ psychic powers to slay, but preferably sway, the enemy.
The movie, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and opened here Friday, is an inspired and nutty affair that also stars George Clooney, Kevin Spacey and Ewan McGregor. Based on the (yes) nonfiction book about government paranormal intelligence ops, "Goats" is no less loopy than Bridges' character: a tie-dyed mystic, a pot-smoking visionary.
"I'm a product of that age, that era," says Bridges, who turns 60 next month. "You know, I did a lot of things that folks did back in the '60s and '70s."
One of those things was hanging out with John Lilly, the psychedelicized philosopher famous for exploring man-dolphin communication and developing the isolation tank.
"I was a buddy of John's," says Bridges, in Toronto for the premiere. "I was one of his subjects in the isolation tank. He studied my responses to it. . . . So when it came time to do 'The Men Who Stare at Goats,' I really looked back into that part of my past."
Fans of "The Big Lebowski," the 1998 Coen brothers cult phenom in which Bridges stars as the stoner sleuth the Dude, would say Bridges brought plenty of that character to Django, too.
"I wasn't really thinking of the Dude when I was doing this. I was going for a different thing," he says. "But I can see how people would think that."
Bridges, son of actor Lloyd and brother of actor Beau, has been working a lot. In a succession he cannot now remember, he shot "The Men Who Stare at Goats," "The Open Road" (with Justin Timberlake), "Crazy Heart" (with Robert Duvall), and "The Dog Year" (with a border collie named Ryder) back to back to back. And in Toronto he was looking to meet up with Joel and Ethan Coen, who have nabbed him for the John Wayne role in their remake of "True Grit."
For Bridges, an acting career seemed a foregone conclusion. After all, his first screen credits were on 1958 episodes of his father's TV series, "Sea Hunt."
But Bridges says he didn't fully commit to his job until after he had shot "The Last American Hero," the 1973 picture in which he starred as race-car driver Junior Jackson.
"Normally, after a movie I'm exhausted — a certain emotional muscle is exhausted," he says. "I don't feel like pretending to be somebody. I just want to be myself. And you get this feeling of 'Oh, I don't want to do this ever again.' And thankfully, I've learned over the years that that feeling subsides."
He finally committed to acting when "Hero" director Lamont Johnson pushed him into doing the film version of "The Iceman Cometh," where he learned from and bonded with Fredric March, Lee Marvin and Robert Ryan.
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