Maybe Take a Look at This, Too...

I found a movie on streaming Netflix that featured David Duchovny, Vera Farmiga, Ty Burrell, Keri Russell, that douchy brother-in-law from "Weeds", Cameron from Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and the star is a young man named Graham Phillips.

The name of the film is Goats, and when I saw the poster on Netflix, I had a feeling I knew a little something about it, but I'll get to that later.

The movie is about Ellis (Phillips), a 15 year old kid living with his mom (Farmiga) on a big spread in Tuscon in the Sonoran Desert, and his being shipped out to a private boarding school in Pennsylvania. His father (Burrell), went to the same school, and at many turns Ellis is reminded how much he looks like his father, and since he's so big for his age, will he be joining the track team just like his dad? We don't meet Burrell's character until somewhere in act 2, when Ellis visits for Thanksgiving and meets his new pregnant step-mom (Russell).

Ellis' mom still refers to his dad as "Fucker Frank", and Ellis was raised to resent him. Ellis refers to his mom as "Wendy", and although his dad had been out of the picture, we see from the very opening of the movie that the Tuscon property's caretaker, a botanist known as Goatman (Duchovny), has been the boy's only father figure for the formative years after Frank left.

While keeping track of the property, Goatman grows copious amounts of pot (he and Ellis have been getting stoned for years by the time Ellis heads off to prep school), and he is an experienced goat trekker. The dynamic of Ellis off at school, Goatman trying to deal with Wendy's mooching asshole of a new boyfriend (the guy from "Weeds"), Ellis feeling abandoned and having to deal with issues probably beyond his ability all give the movie a precarious authenticity. It's also authentic, I feel, in the cavalier attitude to drinking and drugs that rich-kids exhibit.

The movie is written is by Mark Poirier, who also authored the novel that serves as the basis of the film, and I know the author must have knowledge of Jim Corbett. Jim Corbett was a writer, philosopher, naturalist, and was a co-founder of the Sanctuary Movement. During the American funded civil wars in El Slavador and Guatemala the US wasn't granting refugee status to people fleeing the fighting, and Corbett smuggled refugees across the desert from Mexico into Arizona using goat trekking as the method.

Jim Corbett---Wyoming ranch kid, Harvard philosophy master, Quaker convert---describes how to survive in the Sonoran Desert with nothing but goats, and that's the framework for his highly original, highly cerebral, spiritual, political and philosophical book Goatwalking:

This is an important book, and sometimes is hard to get a hold of (took me a while on Amazon, it seems to go through cycles of availability).

The movie Goats, and the book before it, takes part of the Jim Corbett character and makes him a pot growing, struggling father figure, and in the case of the movie, gives the material to David Duchovny, who's underused (but I don't watch "Californication", so what do I know about it...).

The last scene of the movie felt right, felt like it fit with the film's ethos properly, and showed that Goatman was the one person there for Ellis the most often.

Overall it was pretty good and worth the viewing. Also, check out Goatwalking if you're into that kind of thing. (Chris Farley, I'm thinking of you...)