Clint Eastwood sets his sights on Oscar
It’s easy at first to mistake Clint Eastwood’s film American Sniper for a pro-US, pro-military advertisement for the armed services. Except you’d have to be a fairly clueless observer to miss all the damage going on in Navy SEAL Chief Chris Kyle’s life as his obsession with the Iraq conflict unfolds.
Kyle (played masterfully by Bradley Cooper in a performance that develops shading as it goes along) never met the real Kyle, who died at the hands of a fellow serviceman in 2013. But he spoke with Kyle and Kyle’s widow, and says he was concerned only with finding a real character inside a man whose expertise is picking off unsuspecting targets from rooftops.
The script by Jason Hall uses flashbacks to set up Kyle’s upbringing — a Texas daddy who teaches him to hunt at age six, where he shows remarkable skill. He’s a tough dad who categorizes people as either “sheep, wolves, or sheep dogs” and demands that his sons become the latter — protectors of the weak and willing to fight any attackers. If we didn’t get all the Wild West mythology, there’s a framing shot in the next 0scene where a figure is silhouetted inside a dark barn, looking out over a prairie — straight out of John Ford’s The Searchers. Like Ford’s John Wayne character, Kyle is a sheep dog in a world full of bad intentions.
Except this is the mythology part. Deconstructing mythology — while also celebrating it — is director Eastwood’s real plan of attack. As he did in Unforgiven, he tries to expose how horrific violence really is — though this doesn’t stop him from wallowing in its allure.
Eastwood does a somber, workmanlike job here, never too flashy. Could this be why he didn’t get an Oscar nod while the film he directed did? Or are there other reasons?
His first day on the job, Kyle makes the decision to gun down a child, then a mother, each about to hurl a grenade at a line of US soldiers. The moment is not taken lightly. Afterward, Kyle’s buddy pats him on the shoulder, celebrating the kill. “Get the f**k off me,” Kyle says, his eye still staring down the barrel, his expression rigid.
Cooper gets so good at his job that he wants to do other soldiers’ jobs as well. “Don’t get a savior complex,” warns one of his Navy SEAL buddies. He is told to stick to the rooftops, where he can protect marines navigating dangerous alleyways below. But American Sniper revels in this point of view: the soldier as protecting angel, or avenging demon, above it all, scoping the urban debris with his rifle, playing God.
This is where some viewers’ outrage kicks in. Some have had veteran relatives who were killed by snipers in Germany, or Korea. They don’t approve of the glorification of the sniper’s job. But in the overall arc of the film, it’s a job that does significant damage to Kyle’s psyche as well.
The true nature of war may be that soldiers are forced to deal with things at the microcosmic level: what they do at the ground level, the killing level, is what counts; the rest is abstraction, ideology, or Monday morning quarterbacking. Those SAF soldiers, for instance, were just following orders, carrying out a mission; all the blaming and hating and labeling comes afterward, with 20/20 hindsight.
It came as a surprise when American Sniper cleaned up at the box office during Super Bowl weekend in the US. Typically, people stay at home and watch the big game; instead, they were watching Bradley Cooper pick off weapon-wielding Iraqis and, presumably, cheering and giving each other high fives in the cineplexes. What this means for an America under a (possibly) Republican president in a year or so is not hard to predict: will ISIS be the new target that lures the US into yet another conflict overseas?
Of course, the same sort of criticism was thrown at Oliver Stone when his film Platoon came out: that it glorified war, made it seem like the ultimate buddy experience. But the US wasn’t fighting any wars at the time.
You could argue that American Sniper simplifies the politics of war immensely — that everything gets reduced to the tiny circle through which Kyle stares down at his targets — that there’s no room in the story for Iraqi freedom fighters or innocent victims. But this is the design of the film — to show how Kyle, as a serviceman, had to block everything else out and just focus on his job.
That job led to four tours in Iraq, and the script has him on the tail of a Syrian adversary who may have been an Olympic sharpshooter (shades of the duality in Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken). Probably there were other motivations for Kyle picking up and leaving his family in Texas to shoot shady Iraqis again and again. The film doesn’t explore the psychology of Kyle too deeply (and this may also be a criticism lobbed at the movie); but Cooper gets under the skin of a character who doesn’t question his own idea of right or wrong too deeply.
The second half of the film dwells on the consequences of such internal distancing. Fellow soldiers express doubts about the mission in Iraq. In subtle ways, we see Chris unraveling. His face, as he scopes yet another Iraqi kid picking up a rocket launcher, is tortured. Back home stateside, he runs into a fellow Iraq vet who regards him as a “hero,” but Kyle’s expression changes when he sees the guy’s titanium leg. He doesn’t want to hang out at the Veteran’s Administration hospital; he doesn’t want to be reminded of his own mortality, playing against the odds; or perhaps his own failure, as he tells himself, to save more soldiers.
If all of this depicts Kyle as a hero in the grimly silent Gary Cooper mode, well, maybe so; but the proof is in the pudding. After a final tour, he reluctantly returned home to his family, and tried to reintegrate — not just with his wife and two growing kids, but more importantly, with the aftermath of veterans struggling to pick up their lives after losing limbs, and some much more. The real-life Kyle published his story as a book shortly before his death, but it’s not the only source material here. There’s a whole iconography of cinema, as well as war experiences, upon which Eastwood draws for his portrait. It’s not as simple as “USA all the way.” Any knucklehead can see that.
