American Sniper
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Starring: Bradley Cooper, Sienna Miller, Luke Grimes, Jake McDorman, Kyle Gallner, Cory Hardrict, and Sam Jaeger
In 1992 Clint Eastwood made an Oscar-winning, noirish western. “Unforgiven,” about an aging reformed outlaw. The film derived much of its power from its attempt to undermine the genre’s romanticization of violence. Its central figure speaks about his fear of dying, and the film highlights the psychic cost of killing. But still, given that an icon of taciturn masculinity like Eastwood plays the central role, the audience is left identifying with, rather than being repelled by, his bloody actions.
Eastwood’s controversial “American Sniper,” taken from the autobiography of the same name, is a film that makes a stab at depicting the human costs of war — psychological and physical — but still leaves us cheering its war-loving hero. A bulked-up Bradley Cooper is utterly convincing as an emotionally low-key, tightly wrapped Chris Kyle. He’s the Navy SEAL whose 160 confirmed kills over four tours of duty in Iraq made him a “legend” to American troops — the deadliest sniper in U.S. military history.
Kyle is a Texas rodeo cowboy raised by his macho father to love guns, and to be in his father’s words “a sheepdog” — a warrior and hero who can use guns to protect his fellow citizens —and not one of the non-violent sheep who needs his protection, from the predatory, murderous wolves, who must be defeated. Simplistic categories, but Kyle is neither a complex thinker nor at all self-reflective, and once in Iraq fully embraces his role as a sheepdog.
Kyle goes through an arduous basic training that shapes men into fearless, indomitable fighting machines. Eastwood’s treatment here seems generic, and much more originally done in Kubrick’s darkly comic “Full Metal Jacket” (1987). Once “in country” Kyle becomes engaged in urban warfare in Fallujah by lying prone with a rifle on a rooftop providing cover for the troops on the ground who are involved in house-by-house fighting. He is unerring in his marksmanship, but he still must decide whether the people he shoots are either terrorists or innocents — “credible threats.” There are a few moments where he pauses, especially when children are involved (though the situations depicted here are fictional), but he usually follows orders with little hesitation. Kyle has no doubt that he is fighting for both his country and his notion of God and for protecting his brother soldiers. He manifests almost no guilt about what he has done, though one knows that among his victims there are innocents as well as genuine terrorists.
Eastwood provides a great deal of strikingly edited chaotic combat action that is built on extremely fluid cross-cutting. The action scenes act as an antidote to the pedestrian ones back home, where we watch Kyle pick up and banter in a bar with his beautiful wife to be Taya (Sienna Miller). Taya is much more perceptive and empathetic than Kyle, but for Ms. Miller it’s a thankless, undeveloped role. She is mainly seen suffering at home while Kyle calls her from the combat zone, gunfire and explosions going off all around him.
Kyle is clearly worn down by the relentless combat he engages in, but is not capable of understanding what he feels. It’s left to a fellow soldier, Marc Lee, to express skepticism about the war, which an ideologically rigid Kyle has no time for, and in response reflexively asks, “Do you want them to attack San Diego or New York?” But Eastwood gives Lee’s skepticism a significant place in the film.
At Lee’s funeral his mother reads the last letter that Lee sent home expressing criticism of the war: “Glory is something that some men chase and others find themselves stumbling upon, not expecting it to find them. Either way it is a noble gesture that one finds bestowed upon them. My question is when does glory fade away and become a wrongful crusade, or an unjustified means which consumes one completely?”
However, these are sentiments that Kyle rejects (he views Lee as having become one of the sheep), and that Eastwood himself doesn’t allow to define or dominate the film. Eastwood never raises the question about why we invaded Iraq, and destroyed so many lives, including our own, in the process. It’s a given in this ahistorical film that the war is a just and necessary one, and the enemy are “savages.” In fact, shooting the film from the perspective of Kyle and the other American troops convinces us that the enemy is barely human. A truly evil insurgent leader called the Butcher (Mido Hamada) and an ace Syrian sniper (Kyle’s parallel) named Mustafa (Sammy Sheik), whose prime aim is to find and kill Kyle, are the most vivid representations of the enemy.
In fact, there are no innocent Iraqis depicted in the film (except interpreters) — they are either murderous insurgents or collaborators. The scenes where Kyle and Mustafa play cat and mouse shooting through their gun sights across the rooftops, turns the film for a time into standard issue Hollywood — the war personalized — embodied in a struggle between two men.
Eastwood still avoids totally sanitizing Kyle and his fellow soldiers experience in Iraq. He conveys what the war does to Kyle, who on his return to civilian life is totally disoriented and depressed. The sounds and images of war consume him, and he finds it hard getting back to being a father and husband.
Nevertheless, Eastwood’s film views Kyle as a hero. His alienation from civilian life is seen only as temporary, and he finds his way back by helping in the rehabilitation of other vets who lost limbs or were emotionally scarred by the war. His return to normality and to being a caring father comes too easily, the film never probing too deeply into Kyle’s disorientated state.
American Sniper does communicate that the Iraq war has its horrors, and that no one comes out unscathed. (Kyle’s being shot and killed by a disturbed veteran, who he is trying to help, exemplifies what the war does to many soldiers.). However, the dark side of the war that Eastwood touches on is subsumed by his paean to the heroic and intensely patriotic Chris Kyle, and the film’s uncritical take on the political basis for the Iraq War. There is no mention in the film of the Bush administration’s big lie about the weapons of mass destruction that got us involved, or the fact that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.
After Kyle’s death off screen, the film shows television clips of his funeral ceremony and flag-draped coffin in Cowboy Stadium. And then how hundreds of people lined the sides of the Interstate to salute the procession as the coffin was moved from the stadium to the Texas State Cemetery about 200 miles away. These final images capturing the public’s embrace of a native hero are Eastwood’s final statement about Chris Kyle.
For whatever inner price Kyle suffered in Iraq, what’s indelible for Eastwood is the heroism of this warrior with a rifle. It’s a vision that disturbs me, but his film has touched a public nerve, attracting large audiences and raking in millions of dollars. Clearly, I’m in a minority.
“American Sniper” is showing at the Triplex Cinema in Great Barrington, The Beacon Cinema in Pittsfield, and the Crandell Theatre in Chatham, N.Y. For Triplex, click here for showtimes and tickets; for the Beacon, click here; for the Crandell, click here.
