Review from the Hollywood reporter

Reviewed at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival

Several fine performers end up mostly spinning their wheels in Goats, a boilerplate coming-of-age story from director Christopher Neil. The cast is chock full of likable people: David Duchovny, Vera Farmiga, Ty Burrell, Justin Kirk, and Keri Russell all turn up, and all are appealing. Neil’s direction is smooth and professional; screenwriter Mark Poirier (adapting his novel) pens some quotable lines. But it doesn’t add up to much; it’s a wisp of a movie, gone by the time you’re out of your seat.[/b]

The Good Wife’s Graham Phillips stars as Ellis, the product of a long-broken marriage. Mother Wendy (Farmiga) is a New Ager with a trust fund, constantly looking for a new guru or spiritual plan; Father Frank (Burrell) has remarried and moved far away, leaving as Ellis’s primary father figure the wistfully-named Goat Man (Duchovny, in a not-altogether-convincing long wig and fake ZZ-Top beard). Goat Man has lived on Wendy’s property as long as anyone can remember, doing the landscaping and pool upkeep, growing weed, and occasionally taking off on long “treks” with Ellis and his goats.

That idyllic, free-spirited life is coming to a close for Ellis, however, who is going off to the exclusive prep school his father attended. Over the course of the year, needless to say, lessons are learned—about his relationships with his parents, about his trust of Goat Man, about (of course) himself. There’s not much in it you haven’t seen before, though it’s wittily acted and handsomely mounted (the lovely cinematography is by Wyatt Troll, who’s got a clean sense of composition, particularly in images of solitude and loneliness, of which there are many).

And there is a girl, of course: Lovely Minnie (Dakota Johnson), who works in the school cafeteria. Their near-courtship ends up an utterly deadening subplot, filled with trite, done-to-death scenes; they first meet, no kidding, when they bump into each other and she drops her books (yes, that old scene), while her love for literature ensures the whispering-through-the-stacks at the school library scene that I never, ever need to see again.

As mentioned, the performances are enticing. Duchovny is an actor who all but oozes warmth and affability, both of which are plenty welcome in this role, while Farmiga dodges the clichés of her rather stock character by honing in on the rough edges. Burrell and Russell don’t get much to do, though they make the most of their limited screen time, and Kirk is at his wry smuggest (which is saying something).

But it’s hard to work up any real stakes here. Ellis is a nice enough kid, and likable, but we’re not all that concerned with his troubles—there’s not much doubt, in a movie like this, how things are going to turn out, and while Phillips is clearly a capable actor, he’s not able to give Ellis the spin necessary to truly invest an audience. Things get particularly clunky in the third act, when you can all but hear the narrative gears grinding under the dialogue. Goats is a perfectly nice movie, and an utterly forgettable one.

http://www.jason-bailey.com/2012/01/sundance-review-goats.html#!/2012/ 01/sundance-review-goats.html



Christopher Neil. US. 2012. 92mins

A 15-year-old must decide if he wants his future to more resemble his ditzy, hippie-ish Arizona mother’s or his driven, successful East Coast father’s in Goats, a coming-of-age comedy/drama that unfortunately doesn’t have much new to say on the topic of coming of age. Featuring a starry cast that includes David Duchovny and Vera Farmiga, the feature debut of director Christopher Neil has a few lovely moments – particularly around the film’s nicely understated finale – but the overall impression is that too much of this has been done before in better, more striking ways.

There’s a poignancy and wisdom in those last few seconds that you only wish could have found its way into the rest of the film.

This Sundance entry, which screened in Premieres, will probably need to take advantage of its marquee actors to help attract audiences. Though reviews may not be particularly glowing, Goats could help get the word out thanks to its familiar genre – not to mention that one of its central characters is a lovable stoner, a reliable comedy staple if ever there was one.

Based on the 2001 novel by Mark Jude Poirier, who also wrote the screenplay, Goats charts the development of Ellis, who lives in Arizona with his mother Wendy (Farmiga) and a man everyone calls Goat Man (Duchovny), a long-time family friend who smokes a lot of pot and has been part father figure, part spiritual mentor to the teen.

But when Ellis goes to the East Coast to enrol in the preppy boarding school his estranged father attended, he begins to rekindle a relationship with his dad Frank (Ty Burrell), which puts him in conflict with his mother, who has never forgiven Frank for leaving.

In its opening stretches, Goats adopts the laid-back vibe of Ellis’s open-skied Arizona home. But whether it’s Duchovny’s clichéd good-time stoner or Farmiga’s clichéd New Age goofball, too many of the characters around Ellis feel like cardboard constructions. His Arizona roots are meant to represent an eccentric freedom that’s the polar opposite of his dad’s more uptight world, but the problem is that Burrell makes for such an inviting character – assisted by Keri Russell as Frank’s new wife – that he easily outshines the caricatures Ellis grew up with.

Beyond the surprise that Ellis’ father might actually be a better role model for him – despite his mother’s protests to the contrary – Goats follows the coming-of-age narrative formula rather predictably. There’s the standard love interest (in the form of a game Dakota Johnson), the conventional youthful rebellion, and the expected teen angst. But although it takes far too long to get there, the movie does actually enter some interesting territory near the finale when Ellis returns to see his family in Arizona over the summer.

While some films choose ambiguous endings to suggest an unresolved conclusion, Goats winds down in a seemingly rushed, unexpected way that actually hints at an unspoken choice that Ellis has already made about the course of his life. There’s a poignancy and wisdom in those last few seconds that you only wish could have found its way into the rest of the film.

http://www.screendaily.com/reviews/the-latest/goats/5036939.article

Thanks Monty for this

Another review:
The movie was very good, but it wasn’t excellent, and it did not blow me away. I am not even really positive if I was happy with it. I guess if I have to query that I need to not have been. It was just a nice minor coming of age story about a 15-year-old kid named Ellis trying to come across himself in the planet and circumstance he’s becoming raised in (...)
The acting in the film was solidly excellent, Duchovny was the best element of the movie. Vera Farmiga (Up in the Air) played the Ellis’ mom in the film and her character annoyed the hell out of me.

http://www.mcgeeks.com/sundance-2012david-duchovny


and some tweets:

shannoncb411: @David Duchovny you rocked the beard in Goats. Awesome performance!
8 hours ago

aawalters91: Loved the film #Goats this morning at #sundancefilmfest cast was fabulous and the movie is a must see! Loved it!!
10 hours ago

jamesfauvell: #goats with David Duchovny was awesome. Q and A with cast made everyone fall in love with the film even more! #sundance
13 hours ago

ioncinema: Goats: Took the well trodden path of privileged coming of age amidst a broken fam, but new age Vera and hairy Duchovny make it interesting.
14 hours ago

JHoffman6: At its peak #Sundance movie GOATS achieves levels of mediocrity. Derivative cliches all over despite D Duchovny's fun hippie. Avoid.
15 hours ago

Pzready: @Sundance. Anybody out there see GOATS. Is it worth getting up at 8 in the morning to check out.

Thanks David and Tea
This person liked it. I can´t wait to see it.

Modern coming of age story with a completely original flare., 25 January 2012

Author: Phill Rolen from Saratoga Springs, UT

My wife and I screened this film at the Sundance Film Festival World Premier this evening and were proud to have given it a 9 out of 10 stars! This fantastically funny modern coming of age story is carried by a great cast that truly brings the audience into a world of starkly contrasting personalities.
I never stopped laughing for the entire 90 minutes, not just at the overtly funny moments but at the subtle idiosyncrasies that each character brings to the screen.
Put simply I loved this film. David Duchovny as the Goat Man alone is an act that could go on the road. In his directorial debut Christopher Neil has produced a film that I could easily see becoming a cult classic!

Thanks David and Tea


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Sundance Review: 'Goats' Is An Unexceptional, Overly Familiar Coming-Of-Age Tale.

As far as quirky coming of age stories engineered for festivals and the twee aspiring directors who love them go, “Goats” is a fine little movie.

Directed by newcomer Christopher Neil from a script by Mark Poirier, who adapted his own novel, it follows a teenager struggling to deal with his estranged parents as he tries to find a place for himself, but it’s also not really about anything at all, or at least anything original. In fact, it’s the kind of entertainment that’s familiar and pleasant enough that you easily forget that nothing much is happening on screen, which may admittedly be damning it with faint praise. But in a cinematic environment already well-stocked with so many tales of teenagers taking their first steps toward finding their own identity, “Goats” feels like the descendant of a family with an incredible pedigree who decided it was enough to live off of that legacy instead of trying to build anything new upon it.

Graham Phillips (“Evan Almighty”) plays Ellis, an Arizona teenager living with his trust-fund hippie mom Wendy (Vera Farmiga) and her live-in gardener, Goat Man (David Duchovny), who alternately serves as a laid-back father figure and pot supplier. But after he takes up an offer to attend the same prep school his father Frank (Ty Burrell) attended during his adolescence, Ellis finds himself torn between his loyalty to Wendy and his newfound connection to his father, whose new wife Judy (Keri Russell) seems to understand him better than either of his biological parents. In the meantime, he quickly realizes that he’s not the only kid who’s having trouble with his parents – his roommate Barney (Nicholas Lobue) can’t even get his mom to stay with him for Thanksgiving – and starts to reconsider the attention, however unpredictable, that Wendy and Frank give him. As he struggles to find his place among all of these parental figures, Ellis slowly begins to establish himself as an adult, discovering that love and other grown-up opportunities that he wants to take advantage of aren’t quite as glamorous or exciting as he once thought.
According to a Q&A conducted after a screening of the film at Sundance, Neil spent ten years getting this film made, and it’s admirable that he devoted so much time and effort bringing to the screen a story that was so important to him. Unfortunately, he doesn’t manage to convince his audience that it should be important to them: notwithstanding the evergreen appeal of a coming-of-age story, everything in the film seems sort of numbingly obvious, and much of its “conflict” (such as it is) arises from the fact that either by virtue of age or disposition, Ellis doesn’t speak up about the things that are bothering him. Wendy, for example, is a perfectly selfish, and self-righteous new-ager who literally does nothing but speak in florid philosophical terms, but she is so consistently incapable of thinking of anything in any other terms than how it impacts her that it’s actually a small triumph that Neil avoids completely vilifying her, even if the audience ultimately adopts Ellis’ frustration that he can’t connect with her.

Overall, however, the biggest problem may not be the movie’s fault – namely, that the experiences of teenagers growing up is mostly the same, and it’s really only how that experience is portrayed that distinguishes successful coming of age stories from unsuccessful ones. And even for a self-possessed kid who inadvertently is more of a parent than either of his biological ones, what Ellis goes through is unexceptionally familiar – he goes off on his own for the first time, he becomes increasingly aware of his parents’ foibles, he develops feelings for a girl, and he starts to figure out the way the world works. But otherwise, the film sort of moves along at an engaging but hardly deeply involving pace, features solid performances, and mostly distracts you from the fact that nothing’s really going on on screen other than what the rest of us deal with – real life – which sadly isn’t enough.
Again, however, the actors do a consistently good job of fulfilling the demands of their roles, starting with Phillips as Ellis, a kid whose lack of expressiveness plays to the film’s benefit, since his character has a rich interior life but less outward expression of it. Vera Farmiga, one of the most talented and authentic performers in Hollywood, continues an oddly disappointing trajectory in roles that demand so much less than she’s capable of giving to a role, but she manages to depict Wendy without sympathy or sentimentality, and quite frankly it’s exactly what that character needs. As Goat Man, Duchovny seemed to have the greatest latitude to play his character as a cartoonish, pot-growing hippie, but the actor gives him a really engaging sense of pragmatism and intelligence that makes the character likeable – and more than that, a worthy father figure for a character who oddly wants one without necessarily needing him. And Ty Burrell continues to prove himself to be one of the most reliable character actors in the business as Frank, a father whose conventionalism prevented him from seeing his son, but who is smart enough to learn from his experiences and make the effort to connect with this kid once again.

Overall, it’s not that Neil’s directorial debut is boring or even disappointing, it’s that it’s just unexceptional – almost exactly the sort of dime-a-dozen growing-up story that’s become a Sundance/ independent film world cliché. Mind you, it’s well-directed and acted, and everyone involved should be proud of the solid work they did in the film. But without something more distinctive than a would-be dad stand-in named Goat Man, “Goats” is standing on the shoulders of its coming-of-age predecessors, adding nothing except a reminder that every generation goes through the same thing – evidently, cinematically as well as personally.