A superb performance by Bradley Cooper anchors Clint
Eastwood's harrowing and thoughtful dramatization of the life of Navy SEAL
Chris Kyle.
Justin Chang, Chief Film Critic, Variety, NOVEMBER 11, 2014
A skillful, straightforward
combat picture gradually develops into something more complex and ruminative in
Clint Eastwood’s “American Sniper,” an account of the Iraq War as observed
through the rifle sights of Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, whose four tours of duty
cemented his standing as the deadliest marksman in U.S. military history.
Hard-wiring the viewer into Kyle’s battle-scarred psyche thanks to an excellent
performance from a bulked-up Bradley Cooper, this harrowing and intimate
character study offers fairly blunt insights into the physical and
psychological toll exacted on the front lines, yet strikes even its familiar
notes with a sobering clarity that finds the 84-year-old filmmaker in very fine
form. Depressingly relevant in the wake of recent headlines, Warners’ Dec. 25
release should drum up enough grown-up audience interest to work as a
serious-minded alternative to more typical holiday fare, and looks to extend
its critical and commercial reach well into next year.
Although Steven Spielberg was set
to direct before exiting the project last summer (just a few months after
Kyle’s death in Texas at the age of 38), “American Sniper” turns out to be very
much in Eastwood’s wheelhouse, emerging as arguably the director’s strongest,
most sustained effort in the eight years since his WWII double-header of “Flags
of Our Fathers” and “Letters From Iwo Jima.” As was clear in those films and
this one, few directors share Eastwood’s confidence with large-scale action,
much less his inclination to investigate the brutality of what he shows us — to
acknowledge both the pointlessness and the necessity of violence while
searching for more honest, ambiguous definitions of heroism than those to which
we’re accustomed. In these respects and more, Kyle — who earned the nickname
“Legend” from his fellow troops, achieved a staggering record of 160 confirmed
kills, and became one of the most coveted targets of the Iraqi insurgency —
makes for a uniquely fascinating and ultimately tragic case study.
We first meet Kyle (Cooper) as
he’s hunched over a rooftop overlooking a blown-out structure in Fallujah,
Iraq, taking deadly aim at a local woman and her young son walking some
distance away; only Kyle’s specific vantage allows him to see that they’re
preparing to lob a grenade at nearby Marines. The fraught situation and its
queasy-making stakes thus introduced, the film abruptly flashes back some
30-odd years to Kyle’s Texas childhood, establishing him as a skilled shooter
at a young age (played by Cole Konis) as well as a brave protector to his
younger brother, Jeff (Luke Sunshine). After a brief rodeo career, Cooper’s
Kyle joins the ranks of the Navy SEALs, whose brutal training regimen —
including the muddy beachfront endurance tests of the dreaded Hell Week — is
depicted more extensively here than they were in last year’s military-memoir
adaptation “Lone Survivor.”
As scripted by Jason Hall (paring
down Kyle’s 2012 autobiography, written with Scott McEwen and Jim DeFelice),
these flashbacks form the film’s most conventional stretch, including a tartly
humorous scene at a bar where Kyle charms his way past the defenses of the
beautiful Taya (Sienna Miller), despite her early claim that she’d never date
one of those “arrogant, self-centered pricks” who call themselves SEALs. Yet
Kyle belies that description, revealing himself as a God-fearing, red-blooded
American galvanized into fighting, as so many were, by the shock of 9/11 and
his determination to avenge his country. Indeed, the ink is barely dry on his
and Taya’s marriage license when Kyle gets shipped off to Fallujah, where he
and his comrades are well served by his exceptional abilities as a sniper.
It’s here that the story catches
up with that tense mother-and-child setup, this time not sparing us the
gruesome, inevitable aftermath. Describing his actions to a fellow soldier,
Kyle breathes, “That was evil like I had never seen before” — a statement that
lingers meaningfully as we watch him racking up kill after kill, efficiently
dispatching the male Iraqi insurgents he spies surreptitiously arming
themselves in a back alley, or driving a car bomb in the direction of American
soldiers. In each of these life-or-death scenarios, Kyle must use what little
time he has to swiftly assess whether his targets indeed pose an immediately actionable
threat, lest he face recriminations from lawyers, liberals and other members of
the Blame America First crowd (a point the book drives home far more vehemently
than the film).
Not surprisingly, Eastwood avoids
wading into the ideological murk of the situation and sticks tightly to Kyle’s
p.o.v., yielding an almost purely experiential view of the conflict in which
none of the other soldiers becomes more than a two-dimensional sketch, dates
and locations are rarely identified, and any larger geopolitical context has
been deliberately elided. (Some details have clearly been fudged; Kyle says
he’s 30 when he enlists, but he was actually in his mid-20s.) Yet the
achievement of “American Sniper” is the way it subtly undermines and expands
its protagonist’s initially gung-ho worldview, as Eastwood deftly teases out
any number of logistical and ethical complications: Kyle’s frustration at
always having to engage from a distance rather than on the ground with his
comrades; the sometimes difficult collaboration between the SEALs and the less
well-trained Marines, especially when they begin the dangerous task of clearing
out Iraqi houses; and above all, the near-impossibility of figuring out whom to
trust in an environment where everyone is presumed hostile.
This becomes especially crucial
when Kyle and company receive orders to take down the Al Qaeda terrorist Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi and his vicious second-in-command, the Butcher (Mido Hamada),
named in part for his imaginative use of power drills. The hunt for the Butcher
— and, eventually, a Syrian-born sniper named Mustafa (Sammy Sheik), whose
lethal precision rivals Kyle’s own — leads the troops into a series of
breathless skirmishes, from a horrific Al Qaeda attack on the family of an
Iraqi sheikh (Navid Negahban) to a nighttime ambush that develops as a result
of Kyle’s extraordinary perceptiveness in a seemingly benign situation. Working
as usual with d.p. Tom Stern and editors Joel Cox and Gary D. Roach, Eastwood
handles these ambitious setpieces with an unfussy professionalism worthy of his
subject, the camera maintaining a gritty, ground-level feel (with the exception
of a few crane shots demanded by the complex staging of the film’s climactic
shootout) while switching deftly among a range of perspectives that nonetheless
maintain a strong continuity of action.
Below: Clint Eastwood with the Fan Choice award for Favourite Film of 2014, American Sniper
Less
adroitly handled are the regular cutaways to Taya and their two children back
in Texas, providing necessary but over-emphatic reminders that Kyle’s loved
ones are paying dearly for his military service. Taya seems to have a bad habit
of catching her husband on the phone at those unfortunate moments when mortar
and shrapnel are exploding around him (which is understandably often). When
he’s home on leave, he’s painfully distant, reluctant to talk about his
experiences and barely able to function, which is Taya’s cue to spout some gratingly
obvious dialogue
of the “Even when you’re here, you’re not here” variety. What works in these
scenes, however, is the disquieting sense that Kyle’s normal life has shifted
into the war zone, and that his time with his family is passing him by in fast,
jarring blips; we see his kids at only brief intervals here, and the rate at
which they grow up must be as startling for him as it is for us.
In its revelation of character
through action, its concern with procedure rather than politics, and its focus on
an exceptionally gifted U.S. soldier struggling to make sense of his small yet
essential place in a war he only partly understands, Eastwood’s picture can’t
help but recall “The Hurt Locker,” and if it’s ultimately a more earnest and
prosaic, less formally daring affair than Kathryn Bigelow’s film, it
nevertheless emerges as one of the few dramatic treatments of the U.S.-Iraq
conflict that can stand in its company. And just as “The Hurt Locker” found
revelatory depths in Jeremy Renner, so “American Sniper” hinges on Cooper’s
restrained yet deeply expressive lead performance, allowing many of the drama’s
unspoken implications to be read plainly in the actor’s increasingly
war-ravaged face.
Cooper, who packed on 40 pounds
for the role, is superb here; full of spirit and down-home charm early on, he
seems to slip thereafter into a sort of private agony that only those who have
truly served their country can know. (A late sequence shot in an impenetrable
sandstorm provides the most literal possible metaphor for his own personal fog
of war.) Perhaps the film’s most humanizing touch is its willingness to show
Kyle not just reacting but thinking, attempting to grasp ideas that have thus
far eluded him, whether he’s spending time with veterans who have lost limbs and
worse on the battlefield; coming to grips with the difference between him and
his reluctant-Marine brother (Keir O’Donnell); or shrugging awkwardly when
someone calls him a “hero,” as if the word were a particularly ill-fitting
sweater.
While the circumstances of Kyle’s
death add a note of tragic urgency to the film’s matter-of-fact examination of
post-traumatic stress disorder, the moment itself is left offscreen, a decision
that feels consistent with the scrupulous restraint that characterizes the production
as a whole. The visual and editorial choices discreetly reinforce the clash
between the hell of modern warfare (the color all but drained away from Stern’s
images) and the purgatory of middle-class American life, accentuated by a sound
mix that allows us to register the hard pop of every gunshot. While Eastwood’s
musical compositions have sometimes been hit-or-miss, he’s never written a
subtler score than the one here, providing faint, almost imperceptible
accompaniment; in a film that encourages us to reflect as well as feel, it’s a
choice that speaks volumes.
Reviewed at Warner Bros. Studios,
Burbank, Calif., Nov. 11, 2014. (In AFI Fest — Secret Screening.) MPAA Rating:
R. Running time: 132 MIN.
Production
A Warner Bros. release and
presentation, in association with Village Roadshow Pictures, Ratpac-Dune
Entertainment, of a Mad Chance, 22nd & Indiana, Malpaso production.
Produced by Clint Eastwood, Robert Lorenz, Andrew Lazar, Bradley Cooper, Peter
Morgan. Executive producers, Tim Moore, Jason Hall, Sheroum Kim, Steven
Mnuchin, Bruce Berman.
Crew
Directed by Clint Eastwood.
Screenplay, Jason Hall, based on the book "American Sniper: The
Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History" by Chris
Kyle with Scott McEwen, Jim DeFelice. Camera (color, Panavision widescreen,
Arri Alexa digital), Tom Stern; editors, Joel Cox, Gary D. Roach; production designers,
James J. Murakami, Charisse Cardenas; art directors, Dean Wolcott, Harry Otto;
set decorator, Gary Fettis; costume designer, Deborah Hopper; sound (Dolby
Digital/Datasat), Walt Martin; sound designer, Tom Ozanich; supervising sound
editors, Alan Robert Murray, Bub Asman; re-recording mixers, John Reitz, Gregg
Rudloff; special effects supervisor, Steven Riley; special effects coordinator,
Brendon O'Dell; stunt coordinators, Jeff Habberstad, Trevor Habberstad; visual
effects supervisor, Michael Owens; visual effects, MPC, Pacific Title & Art
Studio, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Image Engine, Lola; assistant director, David
M. Bernstein; second unit director, Robert Lorenz; second unit camera, Barry
Idoine; casting, Geoffrey Miclat.
With
Bradley Cooper, Sienna Miller,
Luke Grimes, Jake McDorman, Cory Hardrict, Kevin Lacz, Navid Negahban, Keir
O'Donnell, Cole Konis, Luke Sunshine, Mido Hamada, Sammy Sheik. (English,
Arabic dialogue).
How Clint Eastwood’s ‘American
Sniper’ Aims True But Misses the Mark
November 12th, 2014 by Germain
Lussier
Director Clint Eastwood has great
aspirations for American Sniper. First and foremost, he hopes to make a movie
paying tribute to the most deadly sniper in the history of the United States.
That’s the late Chris Kyle, played by Bradley Cooper. He also hopes to show
Kyle not as only a heroic solider, but a complex man confident in his actions
and concerned about of their results. The film paints a grim picture of
post-traumatic stress disorder and what it does to our veterans, especially in
regards to their families. Finally, there’s also a drive to keep things
exciting, so there are many gun battles in the deserts of Iraq.
Yes, American Sniper is an
incredibly ambitious film with many moving parts. All of those parts work in
certain instances, but only on rare occasions do they all come together at
once. The disconnection makes the film fall just short of those great aspirations.
American Sniper had its World
Premiere on Veterans Day at AFI Fest presented by Audi
The Trailer Tells the Story
Much of what works and doesn't
about American Sniper is in the very first scene. It’s the trailer scene. That
tense moment where Chris Kyle (Cooper) has to decide, on his own, whether or
not a woman and child need to die. The tension is palpable and just at the
moment of truth, the film cuts. For the next 45 minutes we see Chris Kyle as a
boy, then a man. Eventually we meet Chris Kyle, the solider. Cooper has a
steadfast likeablity in these scenes and it’s a good set up to get us ready for
everything that follows. Still, it’s a long detour to eventually get back to
that great scene.
A Legend Is Born and Family Is
Everything
Once the film gets back to that
opening, it moves on with Kyle’s time as a Navy SEAL sniper. Very quickly, he
develops a reputation as “The Legend,” a man wanted by the enemy and adored by
all soldiers. Despite all the violence and carnage, Kyle takes to this role
well, developing a close relationship with many of his fellow soldiers. When he
goes home, however, we begin to see the cracks in that version of Kyle we met
in the first act. War has changed him. It seems, in fact, that he’s more at
home at the war. Cooper gets better as the film goes along, playing Kyle right
in the increasingly large divide between deadly killer and loving husband.
However, for a while the film
forgets that Kyle wife’s Taya, played by Sienna Miller, even exists. It’s just
kind of a tempered action war movie. Finally, there’s a scene where Taya and
Chris talk on the phone and all hell breaks loose, fusing these two stories
together once again. In moments like this one, Eastwood shows the full spectrum
of Kyle’s plight. His soldiers need him but so does his family. That conflict
becomes what the movie is about for the second half.
Many Great Scenes, Little
Cohesion
Even when the film isn't
fulfilling the full promise of its potential, Eastwood’s approach makes for
compelling drama. A scene back home where Kyle is recognized is drenched in
meaning. Every time Kyle goes back to Iraq for another tour – something guilt
drives him to do again and again – the action gets more intense and effective
as the personnel losses continue to mount. Several scenes involving the birth
of his children clearly display that this man is heroic and caring, but also
unable to reconcile the horrors he’s lived with a regular life.
There’s also the fact while there
are a handful of compelling sniper scenes, mostly at the beginning and end of
the film, the majority of American Sniper doesn’t show Kyle as a sniper. He’s a
fearless leader on the hunt for some key Al Qaeda assets, but he does this from
the ground, not the rooftops. This makes the unique premise set up at the beginning
of the film into something a bit more recognizable.
The Verdict
American Sniper works, but never
works perfectly. There are moments and scenes where the scope of Eastwood’s
vision comes into focus, but for the most part it is comprised of many good
elements that don’t quite fit together. There’s no doubt the film is a worthy
tribute to Chris Kyle and represents some of the best work of Bradley Cooper’s
career. It’s merely an above-average effort from Eastwood.
Film rating: 7 out of 10
Bradley Cooper captures the sad,
short life of the most prolific sniper in U.S. military history
'American Sniper': AFI Fest
Review, 11/11/2014 by Todd McCarthy
A taut, vivid and sad account of
the brief life of the most accomplished marksman in American military annals,
American Sniper feels very much like a companion piece — in subject, theme and
quality — to The Hurt Locker. Starring a beefed-up and thoroughly Texanized
Bradley Cooper as we've never seen him before, Clint Eastwood's second film of
2014 is his best in a number of years, as it infuses an ostensibly gung-ho and
patriotic story with an underlying pain and melancholy of a sort that echoes
the director's other works about the wages of violence. Unlike The Hurt Locker,
however, this Warner Bros. Christmas release should enjoy a muscular box-office
career based on the extraordinary popularity of its source book by the late
Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, Cooper's star status and its “God, country, family”
aspects that will draw that part of the public that doesn't often go to the
movies.
The gun — along with its
significance to the United States, past and present — has been Eastwood's most
frequent co-star since the beginning of his career and has played a major role
in most of his best films, from the Westerns and the Dirty Harrys to the war
dramas. As the title suggests, a gun — or, more precisely, an extremely
high-powered rifle — shares the screen with Cooper here, although it is not at
all fetishized in the manner that weapons are in the book.
Initiated by screenwriter Jason
Hall in conjunction with Kyle while the latter was still alive and before the
publication of the book Kyle wrote with Scott McEwen and Jim DeFelice, the film
is surprisingly different from the book in its focus and feel. The tome takes a
sort of checklist approach to Kyle's life, especially his military career, and
rarely dramatizes events in a visceral or exciting way. By contrast, the script
tends to emphasize major hazardous episodes in each of the soldier's four tours
of duty, which are staged with the requisite intensity and are interrupted by
brief respites that illustrate Kyle's increasingly detached relationship with
his wife and family.
There's real snap to the expository
first 20 minutes that establishes Kyle's character as the son of a religious
father who stressed the ever-threatening presence of evil, the virtues of
aggression and fighting, and the supremacy of the hunt. The opening stretch
also features a highlight reel of brutal Navy SEAL training (including the
unadvertised activity of having darts thrown into one's naked back while drunk)
and creates a warm impression of Kyle's boozy, teasing courtship with barroom
pickup Taya (Sienna Miller).
Then it's Wham!, to Fallujah,
where Kyle's mettle as a sniper is severely tested by his first challenge:
taking out what appears to be a mother and son intent on blowing up a group of
U.S. soldiers with a large grenade. So unerring is Kyle's aim and ability to
spot ripe candidates for killing that he very quickly becomes commonly referred
to as “The Legend.” When possible targets become scarce, Kyle joins the men
assigned to the arduous task of clearing houses door-to-door in hopes of
finding a despicable character called “The Butcher,” who, when seen in action,
fully lives up to his nickname.
The urban environment in which
much of the Iraq War was fought is evoked here with a pungent sense of the
dust, smoke, filth and detritus of combat, along with the confusion and
uncertainty that must have prevailed much of the time (exteriors were shot in
Rabat, Morocco, as well as on an extensive town set). As shown here, there was
no telling who or what might be behind any door, perched on any roof or behind
the wheel of any vehicle. Kyle's first order of business as a sniper is to make
the all-important decision of whether a potential target is a combatant or a
civilian; he can be hauled off to face charges if he's wrong. But once he gets
them in his sights, he, with almost unerring accuracy, pops them with one shot.
A bit disappointingly, there's no
real discussion of what distinguishes Kyle from the rest, nor is the man's love
for what he does emphasized to the extent that it is in the book. The politics
of the war are completely off the table here, but there's never any question
that Kyle and his relatively undifferentiated buddies are in Iraq on a mission
they believe in because, as our sniper puts it, “There's evil here.”
After a quick visit to San Diego
on the occasion of the birth of his and Taya's first child, Kyle's second tour
is entirely devoted to the elimination of The Butcher. Brief but grisly torture
marks this rough interlude, which numbs Kyle perhaps more than he realizes.
When he next returns home, Taya
discharges a full round of on-the-nose complaints, such as “Even when you're
here, you're not here” and “If you think this war isn't changing you, you're
wrong.” While it at first appears that the home front difficulties between Kyle
and Taya will receive something close to equal weight with the combat, they
progressively become shortchanged to the point that Kyle's visits seem like
obligatory, increasingly tense pit stops rather than occasions to really
explore the extent of the soldier's psycho-emotional rearrangement and his
wife's burden.
Feeling the compulsion to return,
Kyle has a rougher time of it on his third and fourth tours of duty. The
fighting has gotten nastier, Sadr City is a non-negotiable nightmare and the
enemy now has a sniper nearly as talented as Kyle. Here, too, the film could
have used a bit more detail, just a short scene or two in which the Legend
indulges in a little shop talk, instructs a newcomer, explains how he does it.
After an intense final gun battle
descends into absolute chaos when enveloped by a massive dust storm (which
visually summons up memories of the tsunami scene in Eastwood's 2010 feature
Hereafter), Kyle announces that he's had enough. When all is said and done, he
has spent about a thousand days in Iraq and recorded more than 160 official
kills, although the actual figure was probably significantly higher.
Eastwood handles the tragic
ending with a tact underlined with irony, creepiness and a sense of loss that
echoes any number of his previous films. He might have gone deeper into the ways
the war infected his subject and the struggles he faced after his final
homecoming, but whatever the script ignores Cooper goes a long way toward
filling in. His physical transformation — bull neck, puffier face, cowboy gait,
thick Texas country accent — is one thing. And his skill with jokey banter
serves him well in his early scenes with Miller and some of the guys. But
nothing the actor has done before suggests the dramatic assuredness he brings
to his way of detailing Kyle's self-control, confidence, coolness, genuine
concern for his comrades-in-arms, compulsion to serve his country and ultimate
realization that enough is enough, even of the thing he loves most, which is
war.
Dark-haired and looking markedly
different than in most of her previous films, Miller is best in the early
stretch and seems a bit cheated by the one-dimensionality of her brief later
scenes. Physically, the film is first-rate. Brighter than most of Eastwood's
films, it benefits from mobile and intently focused cinematography by Tom
Stern, highly realistic production design by James J. Murakami and Charisse
Cardenas, propulsive editing from Joel Cox and Gary D. Roach, and a very spare
music track; the sound of bullets and explosions says it all here.
War Plays Out Like a Video Game in Clint Eastwood's Navy SEAL Biopic
By Inkoo Kang on November 11, 2014
“American Sniper” is an uncomplicated portrait of a man denied
complexity and depth. Played by a pinched, marble-mouthed Bradley Cooper, the
late Navy SEAL Chris Kyle is laureled for his patriotism, his 160 kills (the
most in U.S. history), and his roles as a husband and father.
Director Clint Eastwood‘s focus on Kyle is so tight that no other
character, including wife Taya (Sienna Miller), comes through as a person, and
the scope so narrow that the film engages only superficially with the many
moral issues surrounding the Iraq War.
In its best scenes, “Sniper” illustrates how Kyle's removal from
humanity made him such an excellent marksman. The Texan prefers the idea of
people to actual people and has no qualms about his dismayingly provincial
us-versus-them worldview. He regularly calls both Iraqi insurgents and
civilians “savages” — an epithet Eastwood doesn't necessarily endorse, but
doesn't repudiate, either, since not a single one of his Middle Eastern
characters are endowed with basic motivation, let alone humanity.
“Sniper” follows its cowboy-turned-SEAL protagonist from the moment he
enlists in the military – after the U.S. embassy attacks in East Africa by
Osama bin Laden — through his four tours of duty. Much of the running time is
simply one raid or gunfight after another, with little sense of the political
or military context or the timeline of the war. There are no scenes exploring
the drudgery of the tedium of war, only more missions.
The result is not unlike watching a suspenseful but highly repetitive
video game, especially since nearly every Iraqi is seen through Kyle's highly
perched rifle scope. The appearance of each Iraqi character incites the same
algorithm: shoot or don't shoot, shoot now or shoot later. (As the only
character resembling a human being, Kyle is the only military member who ever
feels queasy about shooting and killing so many people.)
Eventually, a narrative emerges: the SEALs search for a brutal
enforcer, nicknamed “The Butcher” (Mido Hamada), linked to al-Qaeda leader Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi. But the structure is too episodic and the narrative too
disjointed for the search process to yield any of the joys of the procedural.
At least the hunt for “The Butcher” ends in a gorgeous sandstorm sequence
that's one of the most visually arresting battle scenes in recent memory.
As redundant as the action scenes become, they're far preferable to the
dreary domestic conversations, which rehearse only the most rote troubles
afflicting military families. And bordering on offensive is the film's
assertion that some soldiers can overcome PTSD in a matter of months through
good acts and willpower.
Eastwood is enough of a skilled craftsman that he doesn't entirely
neuter Kyle into the perfect role model. As rendered here, the Navy SEAL is
full of blustery patriotism and hyper-masculinity, badly beating the guy who
sleeps with his girlfriend and earnestly declaring America to be “the greatest
country on earth.” (Reality check: people all around the world believe this
about their own homelands.)
In a flashback, Kyle's father (Ben Reed) anoints him as “blessed with
the gift of aggression.” And one of the film's most out-there scenes finds a
cheerful Kyle aiming a revolver at a charmed Taya, playfully demanding that she
remove her underwear at gunpoint while their children play just a few feet
away.
Such scenes will be read as problematic by the soft-hearted (like
myself) and admirable (or cathartic or sexy) by others. What makes “American
Sniper” such a deeply unsatisfying film, though, is that Eastwood recuses
himself by and large from delivering a judgment. Perhaps the ambiguity
regarding Kyle's unexamined nationalism and chest-thumping manliness merely
reflects the dividedness of the country on social mores, but, like the
ubiquitous Punisher skulls on Kyle's troops’ tanks, it's not clear whether it's
meant to be disappointingly juvenile or fearsomely awesome.
If Eastwood's feelings toward Kyle's core values are hazy, though, his
veneration for the soldier couldn't be clearer. It's too bad, then, that
cinematic hero worship so often takes the same familiar forms. Writing on this
Veterans Day, I wish “American Sniper” had afforded me the opportunity to
salute real men and women in uniform, not just a movie trope.
Bradley Cooper shines but Eastwood misses the mark with stilted
'American Sniper'
This is minor-key for the legendary film-maker at best By Drew McWeeny
Clint Eastwood is an enormously
capable filmmaker who, like any filmmaker who works non-stop, is capable of
turning out films that are polished and considered and carefully calibrated,
and equally capable of turning out nearly inert movies that are forgettable and
barely register. What I find most interesting about his career is the way it
took him a while to win critics over to his side, but once he did, he's been
almost untouchable ever since. Any other filmmaker coming off of "Jersey
Boys" would have been greeted on their next film with open skepticism, but
it's a real sign of just how esteemed Eastwood is that he could release that
film to near-universal indifference at the start of the summer, and yet his
next film can be greeted like an event that sends seismic waves through the
already-crowded Oscar season.
One of the things that I tend to
avoid in my writing about film is weighing in on awards prospects and the way
one film stacks up against another, but an event like Tuesday night's
back-to-back screenings at the Egyptian create the direct sense of a horse
race. First up was a work-in-progress screening of the
sure-looked-finished-to-me "Selma," and then the not-terribly-secret "secret
screening" was Eastwood's latest, "American Sniper," and both
films were heavily attended by the people who spend their time handicapping the
various awards ahead. While I'm still not going to wade into that conversation,
it was interesting to see just how nakedly the AFI Fest has now become part of
the strategic thinking about when and how to show things.
Overall, "American
Sniper" is a solidly-staged but unexceptional picture, filled with overly
familiar dramatic situations and a surprisingly blindered view of the world
around its central character. While Bradley Cooper does a strong job of inhabiting
the role of Chris Kyle, the real-life Navy SEAL whose story is told by the
film, Jason Hall's script fails to crack why this story is being told to us.
Sure, Kyle is recognized as the
most successful sniper in recorded military history, and he did immeasurable
good in terms of protecting human life in the battlefield. I can't begin to
imagine the way the people whose lives intersected with his feel about him, and
the most moving thing in the film comes at the very end when we see real news
footage of the funeral procession for Kyle. The sheer size of the mass of
humanity who showed up to pay their respects speaks to the quality of Kyle's
character. Cooper does a good job of trying to illustrate the inner life of
someone who sounds, on the surface, like a recruitment poster. Kyle is a rodeo
rider in his early 20s and eventually realizes that he's got no focus in his
life. It's quietly hilarious how the beginning of this film plays like the
straight-faced version of "Stripes," with Kyle eventually realizing
that he might as well join the military since nothing else has worked out. He
immediately decides he's going to be a Navy SEAL, and then jumps into a montage
that would make Matt and Trey cackle.
Here's the thing… by the rules of
Hollywood filmmaking, everything Clint Eastwood does here is right. I can see
the flow chart that Jason Hall laid out that illustrated the way the film would
chart the evolution of Kyle as a character, and the movie does everything
"right," but there's not a second of it where I stopped thinking of
it as anything but a movie, a formal exercise in turning the messy and honest
real life of Chris Kyle, a real human being, into something stilted and
predictable and safe. There are sequences in "American Sniper" that
are staged well, and why wouldn't there be? At this point, Eastwood and his
cinematographer Tom Stern have shot so many things and they have established
such a shorthand that when it comes to staging a scene, they know what they're
doing. That's a given. There are a number of scenes here where we see Chris
Kyle in position, having to make the call on whether or not to drop the hammer
on someone, and that's the entire moral hinge of the film. That's the choice
I'm not equipped to make or judge, the moment that is faced by anyone who is
ever called to kill in combat. It's different for snipers, because they are at
a remove. They have a chance to think about what they're doing. They have a
chance to make a call about what they're seeing. And there are several moments
in "American Sniper" that starkly illustrate what it is that is faced
every day by combat troops. It is not lost on me that I spent the end of my
Veterans Day sitting in a theater watching these sequences unfold.
But speaking of "American
Sniper" as a film, I'm struck by how routine it is, how by the numbers and
predictable. That is not a judgment of Chris Kyle the person, but rather the
film that has been spun from the real person. It drives me slightly crazy in a
case like this because you aren't allowed to talk about the film without it
somehow meaning something about the true story. When I wrote about "Lone
Survivor" last year, or when I wrote about "Black Hawk Down," I
got angry e-mail from people who got mad at me because of the real people
involved in the stories that inspired those films. If you are of the mind that
I am not allowed to criticize the movie because of whatever the real Chris Kyle
did, then you probably shouldn't even be reading at this point.
But if you're interested in how
"American Sniper" works as a film, I'd say the biggest problem it has
is that Clint Eastwood has already dealt with this exact material thematically,
and he's done it much better. "Unforgiven," after all, looks at the
toll violence takes on the human soul and the way someone becoming a legend can
make them a target and it does so with an elegance and a sense of both humor
and humanity that is not present in "American Sniper." There is one
new idea in "Sniper" that I like, dealing with the way Kyle
eventually tried to find peace once he came back Stateside. Andrew Niccol just
made an entire film about the struggle to acclimate to family life, and
Eastwood deals with that throughout this movie. The problem isn't the idea, but
the expression of it. Things are written so on the nose that we're not allowed
to feel anything. We're force-fed it, but there's not a moment in
"American Sniper" that breathes like life. There was a real Chris
Kyle, yes, and the things he did line up in some way with the things we see the
movie version of Chris Kyle do, but the movie version is a symbol Writ Large,
not a person. Same with his wife Taya (Sienna Miller), who he meets in a bar
and then marries at the exact second that he is called overseas.
The character arc that Chris
follows in the film has to do with his ability to do what has to be done. Once
he decides to become a sniper, he has to learn to be able to do anything if he
thinks it will save the life of an American soldier. There's a scene that is
used as framework for the first half of the movie, an opening scene that stops
at a crucial moment, only to loop back around halfway into the film. This time,
we see exactly what Chris does, and it becomes a defining moment for him. He
takes that moment and moves forward, hardened, ready to be the weapon that his
government trained him to be. In-between, it's like Chris barely exists, and
again, Cooper's performance work is so strong that it almost makes up for a
script that I feel fails him. He's doing more work to define who Chris is than
the script, and that's true for pretty much the entire film.
I don't feel good about
recommending a film like this based on the action sequences, because you're not
dealing with fantasy here. You're not dealing with superheroics. You're dealing
with the real world, where someone put a bullet in someone else, and
celebrating how that went down feels weird to me. There's a moment in this
film, near the end, where something happens, someone's brains are splashed
across a wall, and the crowd went wild, and while I get that when you're
watching fiction, we were watching something tonight that professes to be a
true-life story. And if that's true, and if this is true, then I was asked in
the theater tonight to cheer for the death of a real person, and that's a very
strange moral line for any film to try to navigate.
One of the biggest problems with
making a film that deals with recent history is that you don't have any
perspective. We're far enough away from the events of 9/11 that we can now
dispatch that as shorthand in a film like this with a scene of someone watching
the Towers fall on TV, then move right into the impact, but we're not far
enough away to really grapple with the role we've played in the region since.
Eastwood's film doesn't paint a forgiving picture of the way the military works
in Iraq in the film, but he's more concerned with the rotting effect of Chris's
doubts than the moral certitude of them.
Eastwood's scores range from the
overwrought ("Mystic River") to the charmingly light ("Grace Is
Gone"), with "American Sniper" demonstrating a few new sonic
tricks and a fairly unerring sense of whats right for this story. The film is
put together with a very solid, workmanlike sense of craft, and while I thought
the film felt much longer than the two hours or so that it runs, individual
scenes are cut well enough. It's the same basic gang who work for Eastwood on
everything, and it feels loose-limbed and relaxed. The problem is, there's no
real urgency to anything. The stakes for Chris aren't clear. He's so hung up on
combat, but for unexplained reasons, that when he keeps returning to combat,
it's not terribly surprising or terribly upsetting. The fights are noisy, but
they're dull, and if we're not covering any new moral or thematic ground, the least
we could do is get some great combat footage. "American Sniper"
doesn't even really do that, and while I think the film pays a certain kind of
humorless tribute to Chris Kyle, I don't believe I know the real man any better
now than I did before I saw the film.
"American Sniper" is
minor-key Eastwood, a film that certainly does not offend, but that does not
transcend, either. For people who want a perfunctory tribute to a man who seems
to have lived an anything-but-perfunctory life, "American Sniper" should
thrill, but for anyone looking to this as a film first, it is a flat, oddly
stilted misfire.
Clint Eastwood's latest biopic is
a fine tribute to an American hero...
By Karen M. Peterson on November
14, 2014
“I’m not a redneck, I’m from
Texas,” Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) says to Taya (Sienna Miller), the woman who
would become his wife. Thus sums up Kyle’s attitude about himself and who he
is. That he would later be known as The Legend, with more than 160 confirmed
enemy kills, never defines him in Clint Eastwood‘s latest effort, American
Sniper.
One of, or apparently the
deadliest sniper in American military history, Chris Kyle was a Texan, born and
raised, with aspirations to be a cowboy in the rodeo. When the US Embassies in
Tanzania and Kenya were bombed in 1998, Kyle heard the call to join the US
Navy, trading in his cowboy boots for combat boots, and ultimately going on to
join the Navy SEALs. It was in SEAL training that he met and married Taya. And
then in the weeks following September 11th, Kyle’s unit was activated and sent
on their first tour to Iraq.
It is during Kyle’s first tour
that the film opens, before giving us his story in predictable flashback
fashion. While his personal history is interesting, it isn’t particularly
necessary to understand his motivation for joining the military in the late
90s. After all, the country was pretty military-minded in those days, and
anyone deciding to enlist had pretty similar reasons. But flashback form it is,
and thus Eastwood makes his greatest mistake with the film. Unfortunately,
these sequences are plodding and sometimes tedious, although they do give
Bradley Cooper the opportunity to introduce Chris Kyle as a charming Texas boy,
the kind that no girl could resist. It’s easy to see why Taya falls for him and
so quickly. Although the chemistry between Cooper and Miller is sadly lacking,
giving the relationship a somewhat unbelievable and unsatisfying feeling.
Catching up to that tense opening
scene, American Sniper finds better pacing and serious intensity. There were
several times where I forgot to breathe because the tension was so palpable.
Eastwood does a great job showing the realities of the war in Iraq, never
delving into the politics of the war, but only showing what it was like for the
troops on the ground, walking into dangerous situations on a daily basis.
It is during this first tour that
Kyle begins to develop a reputation. Eventually he will be called The Legend,
and there will be a price on his head. But Kyle always downplays the title, and
Cooper is particularly effective in showing a blend of quiet humility and
heroic bravado. Cooper’s performance is exceptional. We’ve seen brilliant
performances from him before, most recently in Silver Linings Playbook and
American Hustle, but he reaches a new level of excellence in this role, carrying
the film on his broad shoulders, while also allowing his co-stars (notably Luke
Grimes and Kyle Gallner) the opportunity to balance him out. While the film is
all about Chris Kyle, Bradley Cooper never acts as though it’s all his show,
and I applaud him for that.
In between tours, Kyle goes back
home to his growing family, but he never seems to leave the war behind, having
unfinished business in the form of a gifted Syrian sniper, Mustafa (Sammy
Sheik). In these home scenes, the pacing slows, sometimes to the point of
dragging. This is Eastwood’s second mistake. While there is definitely a need
to relieve some of the tension in between Kyle’s four tours, these moments with
his family don’t accomplish what they are intended to, and further showcase the
awkward pairing between Cooper and Miller. Miller is certainly the weak link in
this cast, having been chosen, presumably, for her resemblance to the real-life
Taya Kyle. Some important moments do happen during these stateside moments, but
they begin to feel redundant pretty quickly. In a film centered around war, you
begin to crave the next tour. Perhaps this was why Chris Kyle kept wanting to
go back.
And each time he does go back,
the tension ramps up. As I said before, Eastwood does a great job of showing
the realities of the war, and the ever-increasing tension is part of that
reality. After all, as the number of soldier deaths in Iraq increases, so do
the odds of becoming the next casualty. The war sequences are amazing. Writer
Jason Dean Hall certainly did his research, proffering a script that allows us
a glimpse into the psyche of the American soldier, and exploring the reasons
that someone would choose to go back to the war again and again.
American Sniper isn’t a perfect
film, but it is a very good tribute to an American hero. Chris Kyle’s is a
story that should be known, and it is a story that is told well, despite its
issues. Like Lone Survivor and The Hurt Locker before it, this is a film that
deserves an audience.
