American Sniper

As a filmmaker, Clint Eastwood is no stranger to the battlefield, his most recent achievements being the back-to-back productions of Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima.  American Sniper is not as confident of a film as those.  It's more simplistic in its narrative and never has the same emotional punch until its final moments.  What it does have, and what makes it worth recommending, is a great lead performance by Bradley Cooper, and depictions of the battlefield that rank right up there with 2008's The Hurt Locker in terms of intensity.

Cooper is nearly unrecognizable as Chris Kyle, the celebrated Navy SEAL sniper who holds the record for the most confirmed kills than any sniper in the history of the U.S. military. (His total at the end of his four tours of duty in Iraq ultimately numbered 160.) Cooper is bulked up, bearded, broad shouldered and speaks with a heavy Texas drawl.  But more than that, he is able to capture the intensity of a man who finds himself more comfortable when he's looking through a gun's target sight than he is interacting with the people around him during his visits at home in between his tours.  Chris comes across as a man haunted by the friends he was unable to save, and driven to track down an enemy sniper who is responsible for a lot of the deaths of his closest comrades.  The movie portrays him as somewhat of a lone cowboy figure, fighting to protect those around him.  And while this is probably an overly simplistic depiction of the actual man, it works within the context of the film itself.

And just like Chris Kyle in the movie, American Sniper definitely seems more comfortable on the battlefield than in civilian life.  The film does a beautiful job of placing us in a number of intense situations, such as when Chris must decide whether or not he should take a life.  In one instance, he shoots down a man who was about to fire a rocket at some American soldiers.  A small boy who happened to be sitting nearby witnesses this, then goes over and struggles to pick up the man's rocket launcher gun.  Chris keeps his finger on the trigger, but is obviously hoping he doesn't have to shoot the boy down also.  Is the child curious, or is he truly trying to carry out the man's work before he was shot down?  When the boy finds the gun is too heavy for him to lift and carry, he drops it back down to the ground and runs off.  Chris takes his finger off the trigger and breathes a sigh of relief.  So does the audience.  Whenever we are witnessing the horrors of war through the eyes of its lead character, the movie is at the top of its game, and creates a number of scenarios where Chris must make life or death choices, some of which deeply impact him or his fellow soldiers.

It's when the movie is required to send Chris home stateside that the film loses its focus just a little.  Early in the film, he meets a young woman Taya (Sienna Miller), whom he falls in love with and ultimately marries.  Cooper and Miller have some good chemistry together during their early scenes, but once they are married, she is pretty much pushed into the background, and is required to repeat the same scene over and over, where she wrings her hands and worries about her husband's silence, and his unwillingness to talk about what he's going through emotionally.  The scenes when Chris is dealing with having to adapt to a normal life have a somewhat choppy narrative.  The screenplay almost seems to be cherry picking certain events and moments in his life, but there is no follow through or nothing in between to make the narrative flow like it should.  At one point, he seeks out a therapist to help him with his war trauma, but other than a brief scene where he's supposedly joined a veteran's support group, we don't really get to see any of his healing process.

American Sniper is a visceral and intense experience, but emotionally, the movie comes across as a bit colder than it should.  It often feels like the movie is giving us only a small part of what made Chris Kyle who he is, so we're never getting a full picture.  If the storytelling is somewhat suspect, than Eastwood's filmmaking and handling of the battlefield scenes are what make this film worth seeing.  He uses little to no music in the entire film, except near the end.  All of Chris' experiences of war are silent, except for the ambient sounds.  This is an excellent decision on Eastwood's part, and he should be applauded for not relying on a music score to manipulate our emotions.  The realism and tension that he is able to create does a great job of masking the screenplay's weaker character-driven moments.  While I was aware of the problems while I was watching the film, I found I did not care whenever the movie had me engaged in the latest firefight. 

This is a case of a flawed script that's been lifted up by a director and a cast that knew how to make the material work most of the time.  The movie does such a great job of transporting us into the character's situation in its most pivotal and vital moments that its shortcomings often don't seem as big as they probably should be or would be in lesser hands.

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