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4.5/5
The beauty of Clint Eastwood’s filmmaking is that despite everything that has been written about Chris Kyle, sensationally crowned “the deadliest sniper in U.S. history”, American Sniper extinguishes the smoke of mythology, smearing, heroism and murder and shines light on Chris Kyle, a desperately flawed man whose passionate and well-intentioned patriotism led him straight into the darkest pools of himself. It is neither a jingoistic action movie nor an antiseptic polemic on the inhumanity of military action. As with all of Eastwood’s work, it is a movie far too empathetic to see villains or heroes, only victims of circumstance and the complexities of human thinking. Lord knows what would have happened to this story if it had landed in less intelligent, clear-minded hands.
The film begins with a sequence familiar to anyone who has seen the trailer: Chris Kyle, sitting atop a war-worn building, torn over the possibility of shooting a child. Is he really about to do this? Before we see him pull the trigger, another gunshot snaps us into the past, a shot made by a much younger Chris during a hunting trip with his father. Young Chris, too young to realize the gravity of life or death, demonstrates an uncanny eye for the kind of marksmanship too often abused by the wrong people. Is he the right kind? We cut to their family dinner, and we notice a black eye worn by Chris’s little brother. It is here that Chris’s father explains that there are three kinds of people: sheep, wolves, and sheep dogs. Wolves are the ones who prey, and the sheep are the ones who are preyed upon. The sheepdogs, he says, are the ones who protect the sheep from the wolves, and that he certainly didn’t raise wolves or sheep. Hearing this, one recalls Tim Robbins’s harrowing bedside scene in Mystic River, a primal metaphor planted in childhood to root through the ages and flourish into adulthood.
We cut as the voice of Chris’s father guides us into the image of Chris Kyle with which most are likely familiar. A man with rugged dress, ripe musculature, and a piercing determination in the eyes walks out of a barn as the voice explains to his son, from the past into the future, that he was born to be a hunter. These things prove deceptive, as behind the picturesque masculinity lay a creature not of violence but of passion. This is likely what Taya, Chris’s wife, found attractive in him; he does what he says because he means it, even if it’s not always what she wants to hear. We see this in their very first scene together. Taya, played tenderly by Sienna Miller, rejects the advances of a Navy SEAL who could hardly wait long enough to properly remove his wedding ring before hitting on her. Kyle, also a SEAL, explains to her that they aren’t all like that. She isn’t convinced. Kyle proposes a drinking game: they each take one shot for every question they ask the other. Surprisingly, Taya agrees. Unsurprisingly, Kyle drinks Taya into a puddle of her own vomit. Not the most traditional meet-cute, and yet it reveals the essence of both characters: his clarity of spirit and her earnestness thinly masked by humor and mischief. Watching Sienna Miller as Taya, I see the best qualities of my own mother, also married to a Navy SEAL. Perhaps that’s why I found her so refreshingly real.
This scene is why American Sniper deserves to be held up above other war pictures. The ideas within have been covered before, but rarely are they placed in such bracingly human context. The anchor of the film is not the petrifying scenes of war but those between Chris Kyle and his wife. It is about a Navy SEAL. who comes home to his wife less and less with every return until she can no longer recognize the person sleeping next to her. He is not a gung-ho man, which is why Taya loves him. One has to wonder if this was precisely what frightened her the most about being married to Kyle. Even though he survived each tour, she lost a bit of her husband with every one of them, and she couldn’t wrap her mind around why he was led back each time. Did he enjoy it? Did he genuinely believe he was doing right by her and his country, or was his service steeped in something more sinister? When did he lose the mind to understand the difference?
The fact that at no point during this process of personal dissolution do we lose sympathy for Chris Kyle is a testament to the power and depth of Bradley Cooper’s performance. Twelve years ago, a fledgling Bradley Cooper can be seen in the audience of an episode of Inside the Actor’s Studio featuring an in-depth Interview with the man himself, Clint Eastwood, on the edge of the release of his directorial masterpiece, Mystic River. In the course of the decade since that episode aired, Bradley Cooper has polished his skills as a character actor, shed them to prove himself as a charismatic leading man, and, in 2014, earned the privilege of working with the very man before whom he sat all those years ago. His work here is his highest achievement as a performer. To Chris Kyle, he brings a conviction that was necessary and a sensitivity that nobody expected. Some of his scenes in this film rank among the most cutting and genuine I have come across in quite some time. Kyle is not a monster, as some would like to so simplistically believe. Indeed, someone as fundamentally good as Kyle would not be as haunted by his actions and the horrors of war as he so demonstrably was, and Bradley Cooper conveys so flawlessly the silent pain of being split between your ideals and the reality of your actions.
There is a scene in the film that features Chris Kyle firing a bullet in a crucial moment, and we see said bullet sear through the air in slow motion. Not only has this moment been executed in countless other films, but it is perhaps Clint Eastwood’s most visually indulgent moment in a career marked by matchless restraint. The difference is that when Eastwood does it, it is elevated from a simple flourish to an exercise in weight, tension, and ambiguous consequence. Yes, the shot lands its target. I will not reveal who that target is nor will I reveal the circumstances that brought Kyle to pull the trigger. Why he shoots, however, is intrinsic to the philosophy and power of the movie. Is he shooting to protect his country, or is he shooting as a response to the many his target has put down? We relish in the visceral satisfaction of that infinitesimal moment of victory, only to realize what was waiting outside of Kyle’s bubble the instance it fell away. It was the moment Kyle was forced to confront his gestating inhumanity, the point at which he realized his wife had been right all along; war had changed him.
The most damning allegation aimed at American Sniper centers around on whether or not it celebrates the life of a killer. Some suggest that it does, and thus many have made up their minds to boycott the film. Others have gone so far as to call it a propaganda piece and an army recruitment film. To all of the aforementioned, I pose the following: are good people not capable of the same grisly injustices as bad people? Is the line between such things so clearly and clinically defined? I agree that there were instances in Kyle’s career that found him straddling that line all too uncomfortably and often slipping over the edge completely, and the film does not shy away from them. What nobody seems to mention is that these are precisely the lapses in conviction that rotted his spirit from the inside out. In the film, Kyle declares that he feels haunted not by the acts of violence but by the people he couldn’t save. It’s clearly an act of denial, but it’s also a statement not from the mind of a killer but from someone who has killed, and that’s a critical distinction. It highlights why he’s worth remembering; he was kept awake and corrupted by the horrors of the world so you and I never had to be.
Spencer Moleda is a freelance writer, script supervisor, and motion picture researcher residing in Los Angeles, California. His experience ranges from reviewing movies to providing creative guidance to fledgling film projects. You can reach him at: [email protected]