American Sniper (2014, Dir. Clint Eastwood):
You don’t think of the people you kill as people. They’re just targets. You can’t think of them as people with families and jobs. They rule by putting terror in the hearts of innocent people. The things they would do—beheadings, dragging Americans through the streets alive, the things they would do to little boys and women just to keep them terrified and quiet… That part is easy. I definitely don’t have any regrets about that.
— Chris Kyle
Clint Eastwood values understatement, both as an actor and as one of the last classicist directors in Hollywood. In his golden years his movies have grown leaner, as if he’s working in shorthand — call it the Zen koan approach to filmmaking. When Eastwood made headlines in 2012 by addressing an unoccupied chair at the Republican National Convention, it was an ironic fulfillment of sorts. In haranguing empty air, he achieved pure abstraction, freed from pesky annoying stuff like context; like those terse gunslingers in his spaghetti Westerns, Eastwood and his films are now about nothing but ticking off points, as fast as a bullet.
His new film American Sniper certainly cuts to the point, with plenty of bullets for everyone. Within the first two minutes, we’re alongside Navy SEAL Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper), the “deadliest sniper in American history,” staring down his crosshairs at an Iraqi woman and child who are approaching U.S. troops. Are they innocent civilians? Insurgents armed with bombs? Just as Kyle must make the decision whether or not to pull the trigger, we ask ourselves the same questions: Would we be ready to kill these people to save our comrades? And would we be ready to handle the consequences if they turned out to be innocent?
Based on Kyle’s memoirs of his life in the military, the film must have seemed like a dream project as well as a challenge for Eastwood. As a character, Kyle falls right into Eastwood’s wheelhouse as a quintessential self-reliant American: a laconic, rugged hero who does what a man’s gotta do, without fanfare or desire for thanks. But then there’s the sniper part of the deal — whereas Clint’s protagonists, for better and worse, usually strut their heroics in the open, Kyle is an executioner in the shadows, dispassionate, at a remove. Or at least he is at the beginning, before the stresses of war take their toll. The tension between those two personas could have made for a thought-provoking story as well as a barbed commentary on the ideal of the conventional hero, something that Eastwood has pulled off with aplomb in movies like Unforgiven and Gran Turino.
Sadly, there’s not a lot of insight to be found in American Sniper. Digging some subtlety out of Kyle’s book, which tends to be plain-spoken and intransigent in its views on his experiences (the bad guys are “savages,” and there’s no time to ruminate over moral dimensions), would have been a tough assignment for anyone, and Jason Hall’s adaptation opts for a generic biopic format. Playing like a fast-paced greatest hits collection, we rattle through important moments from Kyle’s life. We get the formative years at home (“There are three types of people: sheep, wolves and sheep dogs,” Kyle’s father says portentously, and just to make sure we get it, he points out that Chris is a sheep dog); we have the feisty yet supportive wife who must endure loneliness and panic while Kyle is away on his tours of duty; we meet Kyle’s band of brothers, some of whom won’t survive to the final curtain; and a bunch of hoary clichés click into place at appropriate moments. (Will Kyle get the call to deploy during his big wedding ceremony? You bet.)
You could make the argument that Clint’s objective isn’t to present a multi-layered examination of the quagmire that was the Iraq War, but rather paint a portrait of grace under pressure, following the itinerary of an extraordinary man who gets caught up in extraordinary circumstances. The argument would have more weight if there was more authenticity in the telling (and Kyle’s book, regardless of its tone, certainly has enough authentic details to buoy any narrative); unfortunately, every plot turn and character beat in the movie follows the Hollywood playbook. When one of Kyle’s buddies talks about how he’s going to propose to his gal, you can be sure that he is not long for this world. When we cut to a scene of Kyle on leave back home, you can expect that his spouse Taya (Sienna Miller) will hector him about losing his humanity, or not being there for his kids (“Even when you’re here, you’re not here,” she sighs). Subtract the contemporary setting, and American Sniper is a throwback to just about every World War II-era melodrama about our boys over there. Squint hard enough and you can also see the outlines of a Western, with the troops as gunfighters venturing out into that wild frontier and risking their lives against the “savages” (Injuns?). We also get an Alamo-like climax with Kyle and his unit cornered on a rooftop fending off the bad guys from all sides while steadfast Taya and family anxiously await him at home, and as the cherry on top we have an old-fashioned mano-a-mano showdown between Kyle and his counterpart Mustafa (Sammy Sheik), a Syrian sniper who is nearly Kyle’s equal in skill (in real life, Mustafa existed but Kyle wasn’t the one to bring him down). Classicist, indeed.
Eastwood’s unadorned direction is both a help and hindrance to material like this. While he manages to float us over the clichés without too many bumps (it helps that his actors, especially Miller, elevate most of the rote material), he never lingers long enough to find an emotional core behind Kyle’s earnest, good-old-boy demeanor. It’s to Cooper’s credit that he holds our interest throughout. Buffed-up, with a clench in his jaw and watchful eyes, he suggests a sliver of humanity even when the script reduces him to poses (every time he drops his sunglasses over his eyes, you know he’s shifted into badass mode). Eastwood has too much integrity to glamorize war like they did in those old World War II flicks, and his action scenes are rough and ready, minus the jittery handheld camerawork that afflicts most contemporary war films. At its best, American Sniper sets us smack in the middle of tense moments, making us feel like we’re in the thick of the fighting, weighing life-or-death decisions at every moment. One particular highlight is a firefight in the midst of a sandstorm, visibility reduced to near-nothing, friend and foe passing in front of each other like barely glimpsed shadows.
Kyle (and American Sniper) are happiest when they’re in the shit, with everything distilled to the Zen koan of kill or be killed. Whenever the film touches on heavy emotions or implications, it clams up, much like Cooper’s Kyle mutters a non-committal “Mmm-hmm” to every unwelcome question. The rushed final act, with Kyle experiencing and overcoming PTSD back home, is both necessary and perfunctory: a man’s gotta do what he’s gotta do, including getting over his panic attacks, and Eastwood is too much the reticent tough guy to dig beneath the action to find the pathos. The real-life Kyle met a tragic, ironic end, and the film concludes with actual footage from his funeral procession in Dallas, accompanied by an Ennio Morricone-style swell of music on the soundtrack, the man elevated to a legend. For all his laid-back disposition, Chris Kyle would probably have been flattered by the scene. American to the end, Eastwood appreciates the pageantry of the moment. Everything else is empty air.
