American Sniper (5/5 Stars)

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.

A Most Violent Year (4/5 Stars)

“I have always taken the most right path”

- Abel Morales

The fate of this movie may be a prime example of the whims of zeitgeist. Just like it sometimes feels a mega hit comes out of nowhere (see “American Sniper”), so can a strong well made movie go nowhere for no particular reason. Writer/Director J.C. Chandor’s third feature “A Most Violent Year” did not make much money or garner a high number of award nominations (strikingly The National Board of Review made it their movie of the year though it should be noted that this designation happened before everyone else, including the Oscars, completely ignored the film). Perhaps though this movie should not yet be written to the dust heap. I have a feeling that the maker is so strong that we might be discovering this ‘lost’ movie ten-twenty years from now. It is further proof that Chandor is as versatile as he is competent. His first movie was ‘Margin Call’ an intricately detailed and highly expository view of high finance on the day of a stock market meltdown. His second movie was the exact opposite. He ditched all the words and wrote a nearly silent movie about one old man at sea named “All is Lost.” This time he switches direction again with a period piece about a heating oil business under attack by rising crime in 1981. It looks and feels entirely different from his first two movies except for the invisible sure hand of the director behind it. Sometimes when you see a movie you can just sense the controlled confidence of a Director with a capital ‘D.’ Alfred Hitchcock movies have this feeling. So do Stanley Kubrick and Christopher Nolan movies. The movies of young J.C. Chandor have this feeling as well.

The story concerns an immigrant Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac) and his wife Anna Morales (Jessica Chastain). Abel is on the verge of expanding his business greatly by buying a refinery for his heating oil business. He has just given a down payment of $40,000 and expects to close the deal with bank financing at the end of the month. At the same time somebody has been hijacking his trucks and selling his oil at a discounted rate to one of his competitors. At the same time the district attorney (David Oyelowo) has started an investigation into his company for complying with the standard industry practices which were generally fraudulent. His wife, who has mob connections, does the books for his company. His lawyer is played by Albert Brooks who has completed the transformation from a young neurotic comedian to an old steely dramatic actor. The man is a heavy now and fits in great with the last great character of this movie, the brooding emptied out noir scape of 1980s New York City. I did not live in NYC during this time but I’ve seen the movies that were made in the early 1980s. One in particular, Escape From New York, imagined a future where the island of Manhattan was transformed into a high security prison populated entirely by criminals. People were not very optimistic back then and you can feel it in this movie.

There is violence in “A Most Violent Year,” but it is portrayed in a way that is almost never seen in movies. Whereas an action movie generally has highly stylized set pieces that ignore many real world implications this movie dives right into the nitty gritty of real life. Take these plot points. There is a discussion as to whether the drivers in the heating oil trucks should be carrying firearms. This is a concern because if a driver shoots a gun on a crowded highway, whether in self-defense or not, it has huge legal ramifications for the company. And if the legal inquiries happen that may scare off the financing from the bank that is central to the real estate deal. I wish action movies would take a look at how J.C. Chandor has made this movie because the violence that takes place albeit with fewer explosions has far more weight and suspense ingrained in it. There is even a car chase in this movie, which simply does not feel like a regular car chase scene. It feels dangerous. For example, if they were to plow into a street cart of fruit (which does not happen but does happen in every other movie with a car chase) you can bet that the owner of said fruitcart would have a major part in the movie. 

The look of the movie is where J.C. Chandor is being his most innovative in this movie. “A Most Violent Year” follows the great cinematic tradition of period pieces that present the world of the past through the film stock of those years. If you are ever wondering why so many movies that take place pre 1960s are black and white or have at least some of the color drained out of them, well we remember those decades that way because all the movies were black and white. This is the same with the graininess of the 1970s. And here, the advent of videotape with its over saturated reds and browns gives “A Most Violent Year” its warm 1980s look. Certainly walking down the street in 1981 did not look like we see it in this movie but we remember it that way because that’s how we recorded it back then. Oh and my favorite set piece is the NYC subway completely overwritten with angry graffiti. That more than anything represents what is known as the Bad Old Days.

The acting is great. Jessica Chastain as always fits in perfectly with whatever she is doing. Oscar Isaac has the keen ability to look like someone who no longer walks around the modern world. In fact, in one of his first major roles he played a Roman Centurion (“Agora”). That sounds about right. I want to see him in a movie where he plays the antagonist in some ancient battle against Russell Crowe. It think he will do a very good job in his next movie that takes place a long long time ago in a galaxy far far away.

Oh and I was a fan of the Jews, those Orthodox Jews that inhabit South Williamsburg. Those are the guys that Abel does the real estate deal with. I used to do real estate deals with those guys too. You can just tell that anything that happens in NYC from the best to the worst, those guys are going to be relatively unaffected by it. They have their own culture and they have it for the long haul.