americansnipermovie.com
Rated: R
Starring: Bradley Cooper and Sienna Miller
Directed by Clint Eastwood
War offers its participants a license to kill, and whatever justifications are advanced for the conflict, the power of taking a life can give a person of conscience pause for reflection. Director Clint Eastwood looks at the psychological toll of war with American Sniper. Set in Iraq during the U.S. occupation, the protagonist is real Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, a marksman credited with 160 kills. Based on Kyle’s memoir, the movie softens the SEAL’s blunt-spoken contempt for allies and enemies in Iraq, and his naïve assumption that he left behind a better world because of his mission. The Kyle of the movie seems like a nicer guy than the Kyle of his own book.
Kyle is played a buffed-up Bradley Cooper, an actor better known for comic turns in The Hangover and American Hustle. In American Sniper, he offers an intensely focused performance whose outer manifestations are his sharp-eyed skills with a rifle and bronco-busting Texas charm; his inner life is harder to see but is revealed when he hesitates at the sight of a young boy running toward an American patrol with a grenade. He fires. And when the boy’s mother picks up the grenade and hurls it toward the G.I.s, he hesitates again—and fires. But the war he experiences presents few such moments. Mostly, his targets are “men of military age”—a phrase heard often in American Sniper—carrying weapons and looking for a fight.
After those first shots, Eastwood cuts back to a well-paced flashback of crucial episodes from his earlier life. Dad taught him to hunt and handle a rifle and divided humankind in three categories: the sheep (victims), the wolves (predators) and the sheep dogs (protectors). Kyle was taught to be a sheep dog and joined the Navy SEALS after Al Qaeda bombed U.S. embassies in East Africa during the Clinton years. He was with Taya (Sienna Miller), his wife to be, on the morning of 9/11 and watched the towers fall with hard eyes. When he says he will lay down his life for his country, he means it. But patriotism becomes an abstract ideal. In the line of fire, Kyle is willing to lay down his life for his fellow soldiers.
Eastwood picks up the story with Kyle’s second tour and continues through his third and fourth deployment. Contemporary war can be bizarre: Kyle is on his cell phone with Taya, pregnant and half the world away, when a firefight erupts. But some things are eternal, including the unease of an occupying power unable to sort friends from foes. In American Sniper, the Iraqi population is trapped between sadistic Al Qaeda terrorists who torture children with drills and American forces kicking down doors and barking orders in incomprehensible English.
Kyle has a particular foe in the form of Mustafa, an Al Qaeda sniper who slips through the shadows of the ruined city with a gun eye as keen as his own. But the real problem is within. On leave, Kyle is sullen and edgy, unnerved by suddenly speeding cars and abrupt sounds, running the war over and over in his head like a DVD on endless replay. His wife has trouble relating to the man she once knew. He has changed.
With American Sniper, Eastwood directs a war film that minimizes sentimentality and for-glory action, while maintaining a taut pace with choreographed, Hollywood-style combat sequences. The gritty realism of urban warfare is given a gloss lacked by the Oscar-winning account of the Iraqi occupation, The Hurt Locker. Kyle may have been a man of conscience, but conscience told him he was a sheep dog, just doing his job of protecting fellow Americans. Like many Iraq veterans, he had a hard time coming home.
