American Sniper

At age 84, and essentially retired from acting, Clint Eastwood isn’t slowing down when it comes to his output as a director. American Sniper is the second picture he released in 2014, which also saw his forgettable adaptation of the Broadway musical Jersey Boys. I frequently wish Eastwood would slow down and put more thought and care into the production of his pictures, especially the ones that have a chance to make a lasting impact on cinema history and a profound statement on contemporary culture. The last time the famously laidback and efficient filmmaker did put extra effort and attentiveness into a movie was his Oscar winning, genre-defining western Unforgiven (1992)—a peerless meditation on how violence affects the souls of men and how it shaped the history and collective understanding of a nation.

 Eastwood might have created something similar in the modern war genre with American Sniper if he had explored more diligently the many thematic layers found in the true story of Navy SEAL Chris Kyle. This is not to say that American Sniper is one of those lazy, rambling, unfocused Eastwood pictures that lack coherent theses, such as J. Edgar (2011), Hereafter (2010), or Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997).  American Sniper is a complex and disturbing movie. It’s as technically proficient as a Swiss watch and as morally ambiguous as a Swiss bank account. Unfortunately, Eastwood misses the chance to make a definitive, poetic statement about the extensive effects of contemporary wars on the men who fight them. He settles instead for making a nuanced, but uneven, tribute to a psychologically wounded military hero.

American Sniper tells the story of the late Navy SEAL Chris Kyle. With 160 kills officially confirmed by the Department of Defense, Kyle was the deadliest marksman in U.S. armed forces’ history. He chronicled his story in an autobiography written not long after he completed his multiple tours of duty in Iraq.  Jason Hall’s screenplay for American Sniper, however, isn’t technically an adaptation of that book but an original work based on research and time spent with Kyle and his family. And the movie is far less a by-the-numbers biopic than a rich, haunting character study. We watch as Kyle (Bradley Cooper) slowly changes from a rough but decent young man to an emotionally damaged soul, stricken with PTSD and haunted by the nightmarish cries of those he could not save, though not of those he killed.

Cooper’s performance is unforgettable. It’s hard to imagine this is the same guy who I dismissed early in his career as a lightweight, and not especially funny, comedic leading man. Cooper’s physical transformation into Kyle is every bit as astonishing as Eddie Redmayne’s Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, and his vocal metamorphosis is as convincing and elegiac as David Oyelowo’s MLK in Selma (both films released this same year). Cooper’s bulked up body, thick, muscular neck, slow Texas drawl, and rigid yet fluid way of moving through the world are about as far as you can get from the wiry, hyperactive, bipolar protagonist of Silver Linings Playbook (2012), the movie that first got audiences to take him seriously as an actor. But this performance is as much about what Cooper does internally as his external appearance.  His eyes reveal Kyle’s emotional conflict and torment. The tightness of his jaw betrays the falsehood when he tells people that he’s OK and undamaged by his wartime experiences. Cooper even finds a way to somehow convey the sensation of the hairs on the back of his neck sticking up at times of potential danger. His is a masterful piece of acting, and it helps makes the film, despite its shortcomings, a substantial work.

The film divides its time between Kyle’s life in Iraq and his time at home in Texas before he ships out, between his deployments, and after he’s discharged. The half of the movie that deals with his experiences in Iraq is as intensely powerful and politically equivocal as the best films made about America’s dubious military adventures in the Middle East. Like Kathryn Bigelow’s pictures The Hurt Locker (2008) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012), it pays tribute to those who volunteer to fight our country’s battles, while it simultaneously questions the justness and effectiveness of all the death and destruction these battles leave in their wake. It manages to critically explore modern soldiers’ motivations for fighting while still presenting these individuals as brave, honorable heroes.

All of Eastwood’s cinematic experience comes to bear in the intense, nuanced, and fascinating scenes of combat and imminent danger in Iraq. We see Kyle agonize over life and death decisions, recklessly defy orders, square off against an equally skilled enemy sniper, and process the consequences of his actions. The wartime sequences combine Eastwood’s skills at delivering instantly gratifying action in his westerns and cop movies with the introspective nature that characterize most of his latter-day dramas. 

Yet while the deft, nail-bighting sequences set in Iraq overflow with ambiguities that can be taken in myriad ways, far too many of the scenes set back in the States play like a didactic TV movie. Arguably, the scenes of Kyle’s difficulties returning to civilian life should be the core drama of this film.  Kyle’s struggles to reconnect with his wife and kids while his fellow soldiers are still fighting and dying in the desert are the emotional centerpiece of this narrative. But Eastwood and Hall don’t devote the time and attention needed to bring us into their protagonist’s head in these sequences, the way they so brilliantly do when he’s in life-threatening combat situations.

Of course, the scenes at home are far more challenging to make cinematic than the scenes at war. Still, American Sniper trips nearly every landmine of mawkish cliché and hoary melodrama that characterize the recovery genre, and in doing so, it does not do full justice to the challenges faced by returning veterans and their families.  Movies like Oren Moverman’s The Messenger (2009), Jim Sheridan’s Brothers (2009), and Paul Haggis’s In the Valley of Elah (2007) do a far better job of conveying to an audience the pain, confusion, and loss that follow soldiers home and often destroy them and the people who love them.  In contrast, American Sniper too frequently succumbs to reductive, one-dimensional writing.  The film’s prologue spoon-feeds us Kyle’s backstory in a serviceable but inelegant fashion. We get short expository scenes of his stern father and weaker younger brother, his unfocused and unproductive youth, the discovery of his sharpshooting skills, his patriotic impulse to serve after the 9/11 attacks, and the courtship of his future wife. In the role of Kyle’s wife Taya, Sienna Miller is saddled with so much forced, self-aware dialogue that it’s difficult to see her character as a real person and sympathize with her plight—an unforgivable flaw in this kind of picture. 

It’s all the more frustrating that American Sniper has an intermittently uneven quality because the majority of the film audaciously leaves itself open for audiences to interpret. Eastwood and Hall thread the delicate needle of perspective with expert skill and efficiency in several sequences.  A prime example is a scene in which Kyle attends the funeral of his friend Marc Lee, a fellow SEAL. Lee’s mother reads a note her son wrote two weeks before he was killed, in which Lee expresses serious doubts about America’s mission in Iraq and questions the legitimacy of the respect and glory he’s earned during his tours. After the funeral, Kyle angrily tells his wife that the letter (or its sentiments) killed Marc, not the bullet that hit him. It’s a marvelous scene from which audiences of differing political viewpoints will derive polar-opposite interpretations. Pacifists will take Lee’s letter to heart and view Kyle’s rant as a succinct illustration of how and why America continues to fall into the trap of costly, destructive, and unnecessary wars—because we always learn the wrong lessons from them. While those who advocate for more military intervention will read this sequence as a crystal clear elucidation of the sole reason that America has suffered military losses post-Vietnam—because we always give up too easily.  Of course, stripped of any political freight that viewers may bring with them, the scene eloquently expresses one of the key aspects of a Navy SEAL’s training. These men must believe in the justness of their actions. They can’t have doubts or question their mission, because if they do they will hesitate and get themselves or their fellow soldiers killed. If only every scene in American Sniper had as many subtextural levels as this funeral sequence. 

American Sniper’s abrupt ending is another strike against it. Kyle’s life was cut short right before the movie started shooting. One could argue that it’s fitting for a film on his life to suffer the same fate. Nevertheless, the potential for a profound and timeless picture is again thwarted because Eastwood and Hall are unwilling to devote the necessary screen time to the vital, complex, and ultimately tragic recovery aspects of this story. How Kyle ultimately rescued himself from his inner demons is potentially more dramatic and impressive than his astounding abilities behind a trigger. But, like his record setting number of wartime kills, it is hardly typical of most soldiers’ experiences. The film’s unwillingness to more fully explore the darkest and most unflattering aspects surrounding Kyle’s life after Iraq is likely a result of it being made while his death was still so fresh. The impulse to make a rousing tribute to this individual clearly overpowered the potential to use his story for a meditative exploration into PTSD, the treatment for veterans, and the extreme disconnect between American civilians and the tiny minority of our population that now fight our wars. Unlike Unforgiven and Eastwood’s two other ruminative and poetic explorations of violence—Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) and Million Dollar Baby (2004)—all of which look back on the past with varying degrees of distance—the events and concerns of American Sniper are still with us in immediate and tangible ways.

This kind of timeliness often benefits a film. Indeed, American Sniper has struck a chord not only with critics but also with the American public. In its opening week it broke all box-office records for a movie released in January and instantly became the highest grossing picture about the Iraq war ever made. [It is now the highest grossing film made about any war.] This popular success is a significant feat considering how moviegoers have famously avoided other films about America’s prolonged military conflicts in the Middle East. (Best Picture winner The Hurt Locker barely recouped its 15 million dollar budget, and the much-discussed Zero Dark Thirty’s total gross was less than the 100 million dollars Sniper made during its limited Christmas week release.) However, I can’t help wonder how this film might have turned out if it had been made a little later, with a little more time devoted to exploring the difficult legacy of its subject.