You could call Andrew Neel’s Goat an examination of toxic masculinity, and you could also call The Wolf of Wall Street a portrait of wealth privilege. The trouble with buzz phrases is that they never quite seem to cut it. In the case of the former, “toxic” has limited application: You better believe the poison spewed by the film’s supporting cast of frat boy douchebags is self-produced, but you’re kidding yourself if you think their bullshit is easily ameliorated. A juice fast can’t cure machismo. Neither can antivenom. Don’t blame a person for wishing, of course, but the language we use to talk about destructive male tendencies does a poor job of articulating just how destructive those tendencies are. At least we have the movies, right?
Goat is based on a novel of the same name, the memoirs of one Brad Land, a former frat brother for Kappa Sigma who put his experiences with the Greek system on paper as a way of working through them. Land’s novel is an act of self-therapy. Neel’s movie is an act of abuse, inflicted on members of his audience in much the same way that its graphic recreations of frat hazing rites are inflicted on bright-eyed pledges. If you’re the type to feign unflappability, then Goat’s coterie of frivolous barbarity may come off as standard: Kappa Sig’s initiates are forced to drink until they puke, subjected to verbal assaults upon their sexuality and manliness, forced to eat things blindfolded most of us would rather not eat at all (“shit,” for example, where “shit” means “a banana soaked in the toilet”), and so on and so forth. This all happens at first before, then alongside, the golden showers, and then there’s the goat.
Stop there: Don’t imagine any further. That’ll make you think twice about watching Neel’s film, and you should not think twice about watching Neel’s film, messy and often a touch too muted though it may be. Goat could probably have stood for a 15-minute trim off its 90-minute running time, being too slack in all areas that don’t revolve around Kappa Sigma’s idea of fun, but the blunt force power of the film’s fraternity calumnies makes up for its mild flabbiness. So too do its two lead performances from Ben Schnetzer and, of all people, Nick Jonas, respectively playing Brad and Brett, the brothers Land. If you’ve seen Pride, you’re already well-acquainted with Schnetzer’s flourishing talent, and thus less than surprised to hear that he’s terrific in Goat, too. You might be more shocked at the thought of a Jonas brother, any Jonas brother, turning in better-than-expected work as an actor.
There you have it, then. Nick is good. He’s really good as the elder Land, though he only has a fraction of Schnetzer’s screen time. As the younger Land, Schnetzer is the foundation of Goat’s tale of traumatized collegiate boyhood. The film commences as he’s beaten up by a pair of white trash thugs, who mug him and steal his car after he makes the foolish gesture of giving them a ride home after a party. That ordeal follows Brad throughout the remainder of the picture, which sees him enroll at the same school and rush the same frat as Brett. There are two plot components to consider in that synopsis: The first deals with two actual brothers drifting apart as they bond with their adopted frat brothers, and the second hovers furtively around Brad’s ongoing and unspoken duress.