IT’S UP TO YOU
American Sniper
Review by Paul Preston
If it’s Oscar season, it must be time for mock controversy! Such is the case with “American Sniper”, a film used to debate the ethics of The Iraq War and American exceptionalism by news channel pundits and outspoken cultural loudmouths. Good news for you, I hate them, all of them, so they’ll have no place here as we instead debate the merits of whether of not Clint Eastwood has fashioned a good film out of the true story of Chris Kyle, the most lethal sniper in U.S. military history. The result is mixed.
After tales of Kyle’s prolific shooting spreads, the Iraqis put Kyle on the hit list of an equally skilled insurgent sniper. It’s a total movie plot, except it’s real! If it were a Mark Wahlberg sniper movie where he goes up against the best of the best sniper, played by Jason Statham, we’d say, “well, this is bullshit, but it’ll be fun”. Except this is real, it’s crazy! I’ll let you be the judge as to whether the insurgents are protecting themselves against imperialism or portrayed as “savages”.
It’s a bit callous to say that this story of soldiers doesn’t deliver too much in the way of new material (I mean, it was the guy’s life, it’s hard to say, “Do something new!”), but the soldier returning home to problems has been explored from “The Deer Hunter” to “The Hurt Locker”. The drama is delivered in varying levels of success. But I’ll let you be the judge as to whether Kyle’s stoicism is the result of PTSD or a mechanical desire to kill.
Eastwood’s career is so prolific there are directing characteristics that now follow him from project to project. He sidesteps a big potential misstep in “American Sniper”. The supporting cast is mostly pretty good, from Kyle’s fellow soldiers to the Iraqi civilians and soldiers, who come across as potently authentic. If you look back at films like “The Bridges of Madison County”, where Eastwood’s character’s kids were…less than stellar, or “Gran Torino”, where everyone but Eastwood and John Carroll Lynch was awful, the supporting cast can often be an Eastwood film’s weakest link. Not here.
If any performance has a false moment it’s usually a result of the direction. When devotion to the soldier experience is so strong, the result can be too much romanticizing. Such is the case with most of Kyle’s backstory, as flashbacks play out stilted and cheesy, certainly not in line with the realism of the Middle East scenes. Then Clint gets a little too filmic when a crucial gunshot plays out and we follow a bullet’s course in slo-mo. That may have been a little too much. As cheesy as the bookends to “Saving Private Ryan” may have gotten, the warfare in the middle was always staggeringly authentic with no camera tricks to pull us out. Eastwood might’ve wanted to pull up on the reins with choices like that. But I’ll let you be the judge as to whether the actions of our troops in Iraq are justified or not.
That being said, there are some well-staged battle set pieces, including the climactic one before Kyle’s final tour of duty ends. Despite pace issues in some of his movies, Eastwood has always brought a high-end tech team and their work here might lure some of the people in for action, then hit ‘em with the “plight of the soldier”. The script is solid in its storytelling, even though it may have contributed to some of those cheesy flashbacks. Is it accurate to the truth? I have no idea. Again, as a film, it works, even though Kyle remains rather stoic throughout, very committed to duty as opposed to an undying love of the woman he can’t wait to return to, or anything equally powerful. You be the judge as to whether his enlisting to fight Iraqis as a result of 9/11 is a good idea.
To that end, he kills a LOT of Iraqi soldiers. There’s a “hoo-rah” feeling to it (again probably because of how stoic Kyle is), and the film comes off as pro-soldier (the desire to protect the guy next to you as your main mission was also effective, maybe more so in “Lone Survivor”).
I’ll let you be your own pundit or cultural loudmouth as to whether the film is also pro-war.
Directed by: Clint Eastwood
Release Date: January 16, 2015
Run Time: 132 Minutes
Country: USA
Rated: R
Distributor: Warner Brothers Pictures
