'Goats'

Goats is unusual, quirky, bizarre and yet very much a warm-hearted treat. It is a film that I happened to watch without having known about the film in advance. I was not too excited by the cast either, not when I saw the poster splashed on the cover of the DVD that I borrowed from the library. As the movie began, right from the animation accompanying the title card, I was hooked.

I could not believe my eyes watching David Dachovny as the Goat Man! David's renown for being the lead in X-Files far exceeds his fame as an actor of substance his act in Full Frontal notwithstanding. He has given quite a career defining performance in this film, I must say. The film also has such fine actors as Vera Farmiga, Ty Burrell, Keri Russell, Justin Kirk and Dakota Johnson. And, of course, there is the young and talented Graham Phillips, who plays Ellis, the Arizona teenager whose coming-of-age story Goats is.

The film is based on the book by Mark Poirier, who has also penned the screenplay. Woody Jackson and Jason Schwartzman have composed the music for the film, while Wyatt Troll has done the cinematography.

The film might not have captured really any exceptional ground, but for someone who has experienced incredible identity crises of one's own, my own backdrop of inconsistencies being a valid reference point, the film is nothing short of a revelation. Disturbed virtues can be so widely dissimilar and yet so very alike in terms of identifiability. Ellis, the protagonist of the film, journeys through the oddities that comprise his life and discovers longing, loyalty, camaraderie, clarity and pragmatism in his own way.