Goats (film)

Goats

Goats film poster
Directed by Christopher Neil
Screenplay by Mark Poirier
Based on Goats by Mark Poirier
Starring
Music by
Cinematography Wyatt Troll
Edited by Jeremiah O'Driscoll
Production
company
Red Crown Productions
Distributed by Image Entertainment
Release dates
  • January 24, 2012 (Sundance)
  • August 10, 2012 (United States)
Running time
 94 minutes
Country United States
Language English
Budget $5 million

Goats is a 2012 comedy-drama film directed by Christopher Neil and written by Mark Poirier based on his novel, Goats. The film stars Graham Phillips, David Duchovny, Vera Farmiga and Ty Burrell. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 24, 2012, and was given a limited release in the United States on August 10, 2012.

Synopsis

Fifteen-year-old Ellis Whitman is getting ready to leave his luxurious home in the foothills of Tucson, Arizona for his freshman year at Gates Academy, an East Coast prep school. This means leaving behind Wendy, his flaky, New Age mother, and the only real father he has ever known, Goat Man.[1]

Cast

Production

Casting

In May 2010, it was reported that Ty Burrell had signed on to star in the film.[2] In January 2011, it was announced that David Duchovny and Vera Farmiga had been cast in leading roles for the film.[3] That same month, Keri Russell, Minnie Driver and Will Arnett were cast in supporting roles.[4] Arnett later dropped out of the cast before filming began. Producer Daniela Taplin Lundberg commented on the casting: "Goats is that wonderful combination of hilarious and poignant, and we're so thrilled that actors as distinguished as this ensemble have responded to the script with such passion."[5]

Filming

Principal photography for the film took place in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Tucson, Arizona, and Watertown, Connecticut in February 2011.

Reception

The film received generally negative reviews from film critics. It currently holds a 20% "rotten" rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 25 reviews.[6] Robert Abele from The Los Angeles Times wrote: "A coming-of-age story featuring Vera Farmiga as a narcissistic New Age mom, David Duchovny as her pot-smoking Jesus-bearded goat herder/poolman and Ty Burrell as the divorced dad with the new wife, would appear to have all sorts of behavioral flavors to chew on. Alas, Goats – to borrow from the traits of its titular ruminants – nibbles on a lot of stuff it never gets around to digesting."[7] Sara Stewart of The New York Post wrote: "There's a particularly irritating type of rich-boy coming-of-age movie in which any emotional growth is reflected in only the slightest tweak on the handsome protagonist's stony visage. If I were Holden Caulfield, I might call it lousy. It's the type of strummy-guitar-scored indie that's flypaper for quirky actors like Farmiga and Duchovny, who are given too much time to indulge their characters' back stories and to show off, respectively, their primal scream and goat imitation."[8]

Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly wrote: "Ellis, an alienated teen, smokes weed and hangs out with a goat-obsessed, pot-cultivating surrogate father. New Age details aside, though, Ellis is easily identifiable as a distant cousin-by-genre to J.D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield, complete with a prep-school education. Mark Jude Poirier adapted the screenplay from his own lively 2001 coming-of-age novel. As directed by Christopher Neil, Goats reports the same events but loses the flavor of the journey."[9] The New York Times‍‍ '​‍s Stephen Holden wrote: "If the aimless characters in Goats didn't feel so uncomfortably lifelike, it would be tempting to heap scorn on this wispy screen adaptation of Mark Jude Poirier's 2001 novel, directed by Christopher Neil from a screenplay by Mr. Poirier. Ms. Farmiga gives a bravely unsympathetic performance as the hysterical, self-pitying Wendy, who is filled with rage at her ex-husband, Frank. For all its verisimilitude Goats doesn't add up to much. The most coherent subplot in a movie that jumps around from place to place involves Ellis' mild prep-school misadventures with his chubby sad-sack roommate, Barney. Mr. Neil, making his directorial debut, strings together scenes with no regard for structure; the movie just wanders from incident to incident. There is no dramatic or comic center to this coming-of-age story, whose characters eventually connect with one another a little better than they did at the beginning. Nor is there much doubt that Ellis, a well-grounded A student, is in little serious danger. If Mr. Neil had the tonal mastery of Wes Anderson, Goats could have been so much more than an episodic sequence of whimsical little psychodramas."[10]

However, not all reviews were negative. Shannon M. Houston of Paste gave the film a positive review, writing: "Sweet and simple, almost to a fault, Goats tells a familiar story of a child at the center of a bitter feud between his long-since divorced parents. Still, there's something about Goats that makes the clichéd narrative almost forgivable. For one, each cast member delivers a solid performance, although it would have been nice to see someone go over-the top a bit. (Granted, this might have been difficult in what is, in many ways, a stoner comedy.) Duchovny, Phillips, Farmiga, and Burrell stay true to their roles, but few risks are taken and even the lovely visage of Anthony Anderson is under-utilized in a film that could have used a few more laughs. If anyone takes it there, it's Farmiga, who represents a generation of mothers so afraid of being prototypical they lose their children."[11] Critic Kirk Honeycutt wrote: "Goats isn't a film filled with great adventures or hugely emotional scenes. Yet in its own quiet way, this is a very effecting drama about a teenage boy buffeted by starkly contrasting role models from the adult world. Director Christopher Neil and writer Mark Jude Poirer, adapting his own novel to the screen, very often go against the usual grain for dramatic films: No big attention-getting opening, an ending that is more like a beginning and not everything gets explained away. Rather the film concentrates on its very human characters, their foibles and vulnerabilities. It's richly rewarding in ways even indie adult movies rarely are these days."[12]

References

External links