Early on in “American Sniper,” Chris Kyle (played by Bradley Cooper)
sidles up to his future wife in a bar. She tells him to get lost. Why he asks?
Because you are a Navy Seal she says, and Navy Seals are pushy, self-centered,
egotistical, loud, etc. Chris takes most of this in a way that suggests he is
in agreement with her assessment of how Nacy Seals are. He does however take
issue with one adjective. “Self-centered,” he objects, “I would give my life
for my country. How is that self-centered?”
“American Sniper” is an extraordinary character study. It shows the life
of Chris Kyle who served four tours in the Iraq War and was credited with 160
confirmed kills as a sniper before coming home and being shot and killed by a
fellow veteran with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. As far as war movies are
concerned it belongs in that new brand of modern cinema that makes obsolete the
line between a bullshit PG rated John Wayne version of war and a slow motion
violin-playing Oliver Stone version of a war. It is more like the “The Hurt
Locker,” another movie that showed real brutality of a battle side by side with
its strange ability to seduce the fighter to keep coming back to it. Like the
I.E.D. specialist in “The Hurt Locker,” Chris Kyle only owes one tour of duty
but keeps volunteering for more. Once he is home with his loving wife and kids
he can’t think of anything more important than going back to Iraq to finish the
war.
Cinema in general is a liberal establishment and this type of behavior
is unreal to most of the people in it. They look at Chris Kyle’s
accomplishments (i.e. killing a record number of people) in a very unpopular
war and recoil at the idea that anybody over there could be called a hero. I
hope they see this movie because the fact that Chris Kyle was nicknamed
“Legend” by his fellow soldiers has far less an insidious truth to it than they
think. He was “Legend” because when he watched over the battlefield with his
rifle, the men on the ground were never safer. (In one scene the soldiers
relieving him at his post find him in position on his rifle but stinking of
urine. He wouldn’t take his sight off the street for however long it would take
to piss.) In other words, Kyle saved many lives of American soldiers and that
is why he is considered a hero. Unfortunately those statistics are impossible
to tally. Of course one could make the argument that the entire war was wrong in
the first place so it does not matter that Kyle killed people to save people if
nobody at all deserved to die. I think Chris Kyle had the best retort in his
book, “We didn’t vote in Congress; we didn’t vote to go to war. I signed up to
protect this country, I do not choose the wars.”
I submit that this movie is apolitical. Chris Kyle surely was pro-war,
but this movie takes a middle ground. How the movie shrewdly pulls this off is
by assigning doubts about the war to other characters in the movie. One of his
fellow soldiers asks Kyle if he ever reads that Bible he carries around.
Another writes a derisive poem about ‘Glory’ that is subsequently read at his
own funeral. (Kyle suggests that the attitude that brought about the poem got
the soldier killed but the movie itself gives the poem reverential treatment.)
Kyle’s brother upon leaving Iraq after a tour tells him, “Fuck this place” as
if coming there was the worst decision he ever made in his life. The multitude
of viewpoints amongst the veterans in the movie is what makes this movie
pro-veteran first than about any sort of politics. If there was a veteran that
felt it, this movie wants to show it. Movies about controversial topics
generally make their characters choose sides and then take a side as well,
which usually has the effect of judging those characters that picked the wrong
side. I think it is fair to say that “American Sniper” supports everyone. Clint
Eastwood directed this movie. It is arguably his best movie since “Unforgiven”
in 1993. It is very inspiring to see a movie with this much energy and
precision made by a guy in his mid-80s. Eastwood has made good movies in the
last decade (Million Dollar Baby, Gran
Torino) but they generally felt like an old man who wasn’t about to make a
great movie ever again made them. I was wrong.
I was also wrong about what I felt was the natural range of Bradley
Coopers’ acting ability. This is arguably his best performance and a role he
almost completely disappears into. If you had asked me to cast someone like
Chris Kyle, Bradley Cooper would not have been my first choice. But here he
gains a good amount of weight in pure muscle, grows a beard, and has a great
sounding Texan accent. He pulls off two counterintuitive personality traits:
Being a macho guy but not being conceited about it. That is to say he
completely loses the Romantic Comedy pretty boy without completely gaining the
Schwarzeneggarian action hero. The story, the performance, the very strong
writing, and the clarity of the directing, elevate Chris Kyle’s life into the
realm of Shakespearean tragedy. That is to say the character traits of Chris
Kyle, namely his comfort with firearms and his unwavering convictions, make him
great on the battlefield and at the same time provide for his downfall
post-war. The last two scenes of this movie involve him jokingly pointing a
revolver at his wife (perhaps the biggest do not do in the annals of gun
safety) and then taking a veteran with PTSD to a shooting range because gee
isn’t shooting things a fun thing to do. What is the rule for biopics: If it
were completely fictional would it be any good. This movie would be great even
if there were no real Chris Kyle.
There are two minor problems with the movie that I felt could have been
done better. One was the treatment of Chris Kyle’s Iraqi doppelganger, an
Olympic sharpshooter that plays for the other side and becomes Kyle’s main
antagonist throughout the movie. I don’t believe he gets any lines and his life
on the other side is unexplored. It would have been cool if we learned more
about him. Also the movie’s pinnacle action sequence suffers from we may call a
“Fury” problem if anyone remembers my review of that movie from last fall. The Iraqi
insurgents display a stunning lack of tactics when they attack a building holding
only four Americans and suffer countless casualties. That sort of thing never
happens in a war and is a letdown in a movie that otherwise took the war scenes
seriously. But it wasn’t that bad and didn’t wholly compromise the seriousness
of the movie.
Go see “American Sniper." Bring along a sense of
empathy.
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