Review: ‘American Sniper’

Rah rah, sis-boom-bah, let’s go Americ – hunh? Hold on, wait a minute there. “American Sniper” isn’t one of them flag waving, we are awesome, kill em all and let God sort the rest out, let’s feel good about what our country has done kind of war movies. Man World War II was good for that kind of stuff. But ever since Vietnam, and especially with the quagmires our country are currently embroiled within, it’s been a bunch of debbie downers, “oh look at what hell War hath wrought upon men’s souls” kind of movies.

So here we go with another of these nuanced, not so black and white portrayals of war, along with a complex look at what is considered one of our greatest military heroes for a number of reasons. So put your flags down, this is not the kind of movie that waves them around, the flags in this movie usually drape coffins and are folded up and handed to widows.

Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) is a shit kickin’ Texan, a cowboy wanna be who rides broncos at rodeos on the weekends with his brother, feeling like he has more to offer the world. One day he sees news footage about an attack on an American embassy and good old patriotism hits him right in the nuts and he goes to the nearest recruiting office and signs up for the Navy SEALS at age 30. And of course we know he survives the training and since we know the title of the movie, we know he becomes quite amazing with a sniper rifle, coming to it quite naturally. Around this time two things happen to change his life forever. He meets the woman that would become his wife and the mother of his children, which is pretty big. And then there’s 9/11, which directly effects him because he finds himself deployed to Iraq, where he uses his sniper skills to protect his fellow servicemen.

And with all the training and the camaraderie and “we support you” sentiments from back home and the mental toughness and resolve of spirit it takes to become a SEAL, still nothing prepared Chris Kyle for his first kill on his first tour, and it left him shaken, and he never really recovered from that first kill. All he could do was justify it for what it was, which was a necessity to ensure the safety of a large number of his fellow American soldiers, men that he was tasked with making sure they survived the day so that they could hopefully sometime in the future go home to their families. This is the horror of war, when people are prompted to do some horrible things all in the name of a greater good, whether that be to protect the homeland from some unforeseeable foreign invasion or something as simple as making sure the person in uniform next to you remained un-shot and totally not blown up, moral compromises must be made.

Chris Kyle was definitely morally compromised, but he was in a place where kids were liable to be wielding weapons, where insurgents were so hard to spot that soldiers could find themselves sharing dinner with them, in which an enemy sniper is amassing his own reputation that mirrors Kyle’s, a legend for his own people, a boogeyman to the others. A lot of the rules of normal day to day civilian life no longer apply, there are new rules to live by, and these are rules that mean life or death, and it is must be nearly impossible for a person to have to live in this kind of mindset for any stretch of time and not have it affect them in any way. Chris Kyle, though, does the macho man bullshit thing that a lot of guys fall into, the whole bottling it up thing, and he refuses to back down to these new demons in his life, he just keeps shoving it down further inside him and goes back for more, under the pretense of serving his country and wanting to protect his brothers in arms. But there certainly was more. “War is a force that gives us meaning” after all. Did he miss the rush and excitement of the battles? Did he feel guilty for being home with his family while others continued to fight back over there?

This of course wrecks havoc on his family life, and we get a little bit of this, with his wife (Sienna Miller) raising their two kids pretty much by herself while he is off for 9 months at a time, their intermittent phone conversations usually getting cut off in a hail of gun fire, which is something a pregnant woman should probably not have to listen to at  any point in her life. That’s a tough one. The scenes back in he homeland is really where the movies gets riveting, mostly thanks to Bradley Cooper’s pretty incredible performance. He gets this intense look on his face sometimes, and when he hears things like a drill in a auto shop or a neighbor’s lawn mower, he gets all jumpy and he kind of looks like he might pounce and just attack any one in the room, kind of scary looking. Like when he lays in bed with his wife and she pleads with him to act like a human again while he dead eyes the ceiling like a cyborg. What the hell was going on in that guy’s brain? He saw so much horror. And he just wouldn’t talk about it. He would just sit there and stew in his own juices.

Naturally a good portion of the movie is dedicated to showing us some of the craziness Kyle had to navigate during his four tours of duty. These sections of the film may have benefited the most from Clint Eastwood’s very laconic, laid back style of filmmaking. He’s not a flashy guy with his movies, he famously films rehearsal takes and just uses them and moves on, he doesn’t yell action or cut on a set and instead quietly says go and stop, he tinkers on a piano a little bit and uses it as a soundtrack in all of his movies, he has his style that he just applies to each of his movies regardless of their genres. And with a war movie, he never feels compelled to succumb to depicting the freneticism and chaos of war by shaking the camera to infer immediacy and use quick editing to imply speed as well as to hide sloppy or slow stunt work. His old school style and sensibilities instead gives us a steady, unblinking look at these battles and we always know where everything is and where everyone is and what their goals are, there is no confusion for us, and this builds the tension and drama through each scene, as opposed to a bunch of sloppy images slapped together, so that we are just waiting for the abstract montage to end so we can get a body count and move on.

Of course a movie like this and about a guy like this would get all the political boo birds out on both sides, which is funny because this movie is as apolitical as it gets for a war movie. One character in one scene openly wonders if they he remembers or even knows why they were fighting in the first place, and otherwise this movie could have been about ANY war. This could have been Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Korea, the trenches of World War I, the War of 1812, the American Revolution, it doesn’t matter what the exact politics are of the time because war is war is war, naa’mean? Change around the people in power and their political aspirations and we still have large groups of people, usually the poor, sent out to battle other large groups of people to the death, all for the benefit of the higher ups.

And yet there is no shortage of people writing different politically leaning pieces about this movie, covering both sides of the political aisle. Apparently if you are an “East Coast liberal” (and which obviously must apply to the West Coast cause that’s where Hollywood is, right?) then this movie is some sort of Republican propaganda machine that white washes our country’s involvement in the Middle East. But if you are a “Red Stater,” you know, the God and Guns crowd, this movie is a paean to American exceptionalism through it’s portrayal of the deep bonds made through the brotherhood of war. And it is fascinating to watch two different sides with their opposing viewpoints come at this movie and see it so differently, and both see it so wrongly. The absence of a political message or theme from Clint Eastwood just leaves a vacuum for these people to project their own viewpoints on it, which then requires praising or damning based on their perceived political views, both sides totally missing the point of “American Sniper.”

War is fucking terrible, guys. I am talking to both of you political meatheads. Shut off the FOX News and MSNBC, close your Drudge Report and RawStory links, sit down and shut up. At this point it doesn’t matter if you are for or against these wars, this is just a time to remember the personal toll, the real tragedies of these massively destructive campaigns waged by corporations, the whole “boots on the ground” part of the equation. Some of these guys sign up because they want to help, others sign up because they felt lost and needed direction, and in some parts of this world, people get signed up automatically and are forced to join the military, and they get chewed up by the machine and get spit out the other end, changed forever. The lucky ones get to go home with a minimum of psychological scarring, and then there are the ones who coming home sans limbs, counting their blessings that they still have one of their hands, or that they are alive at all, but of course most of them have a combination of the two, and they are afraid to share their feelings with other people, especially civilians because us soft civvies can’t relate, we have no idea what they went through, so how can they confide in us? So even when they come back home, they still only have each other to turn to, and that’s sad because despite their rationale for getting themselves in those situations, they still managed to get out of them and then they are expected to just live the rest of their lives? Oof. That can not be an easy existence.

So is “American Sniper” an ode to American exceptionalism? Nope. Is it an homage to brotherhood? Not really. This movie is about the soldier as a singular entity, how the soldier has a family at home that he fights for as well as a family that he fights with and come on now it has to be hard to have two families. They say you can’t serve two masters. It is a lot for a person to devote his or herself fully to a cause they find so noble, while also having to be fully committed to their own personal relationships and families. Some are more successful at it than others, just like with anything in life. Thanks to his openness with his memoir, Chris Kyle ended up being a great person to tell this story, the ultimate example of that struggle and what it takes to be such a person. Inasmuch, this movie is quite successful.