OVP: American Sniper (2014)

Film: American Sniper (2014)
Stars: Bradley Cooper, Sienna Miller, Max Charles, Luke Grimes, Jake McDorman
Director: Clint Eastwood
Oscar History: 6 nominations/1 win (Best Picture, Actor-Bradley Cooper, Adapted Screenplay, Film Editing, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing*)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

I have frequently argued, to the chagrin of many, that when conversations about various viewpoints in cinema are being discussed, we cannot dismiss the conservative perspective.  Frequently conversation about wanting more diversity in film centers upon more racial, gender, and sexual orientation diversity (and lord knows we need more of all of the above), but political diversity is a thing too, and the Republican right, it should be said, doesn't frequently get great masters of cinema championing their causes in cinematic form in the same way that liberal politics get positioned in great movies (when Kirk Cameron is your most-noted leading man, there's clearly a problem).  So I went into American Sniper with as open of a mind as possible, and tried desperately to keep that belief alive, because Clint Eastwood (arguably the most famous Republican behind the camera) can make truly excellent movies when he puts his mind to it.

(Spoilers Ahead) The problem with American Sniper is that the film is not excellent.  In fact, it's pretty bad.  This has nothing to do with the actual politics of the film (though we'll get there in a second), and more to do with the fact that the movie has very little to say about, well, anything.  The film, the story of Chris Kyle (Cooper), the deadliest sniper in American history, suffers dramatically because Eastwood doesn't spend enough time wrestling with the emotional complexities of his protagonist.  Chris Kyle, for those that don't know a lot about him (I didn't before this movie), was not as morally upright in real life as he appeared in even the worst of scenes in the film.  In both his book and in other public commentary, he frequently bragged about how "fun" it was to kill people in Iraq, had an extremely black-and-white vision of the geo-political world, and claimed that he killed looters during Hurricane Katrina (though this was never substantiated, and does call into question his attitudes toward authority and vigilantism).

Eastwood, though, glosses through almost all of these aspects of Kyle's real-life persona.  I frequently complain about how real life hinders your ability to make films, and that liberties should be made, so I'm not 100% against changing a real-life figure, but to make him less complex is hardly the right direction in a movie.  The real-life Kyle is a far more fascinating subject-a man that by any conventional definition of a hero would qualify for the title, but whose belief system and attitudes toward morality make us question whether even the bravest of citizens deserve our most unabashed of praise.

Being that this is a Clint Eastwood picture, it's not entirely bad, and there are moments that are extremely riveting.  The best scene of the film was the terrificly nail-biting scene from the trailer (American Sniper's gargantuan Box Office may in part be benefitting from the best trailer of any movie of 2014).  The scene, where Kyle is debating whether or not a woman and child are a threat to his brothers in uniform, brings a weird question of morality into the mix.  The question, unlike many films, isn't whether or not the two civilians poise a threat to Kyle's fellow soldiers (they do), but what your reaction to killing them should be.  As the film continues, we see a continually de-sensitized Kyle finding more and more comfort on the battlefield, and Eastwood's directorial argument isn't that war isn't hell, but that war requires someone who sees the world like Chris Kyle, someone who cannot see in shades of grey, but in order to survive has to find a way to hate his enemy in the most basic of ways.

Had that been the principle thesis of Eastwood's picture, this would have been a very good movie (and again, one that would couple with conservative politics).  However, Eastwood doesn't jive that with some of the later scenes with Kyle and with those at home.  He blames Kyle's attitudes and actions not on his internal feelings about war and his enemies abroad, but on PTSD.  He makes Kyle's focus not on the continual high of his sniper's post, but simply a revenge tale in the trenches.  And he underwrites every other character, particularly Sienna Miller's wife role, who doesn't even need a name she falls into every single cliche about a wartime widow that you could possibly imagine.  The only character with any sort of depth is Bradley Cooper's Chris Kyle.  Cooper, who is on a role artistically lately, finds a center in Kyle that I don't know a lot of other actors would have, but the script doesn't do his performance enough services, and he merely rises above a badly-balanced story, rather than doing something superb, which he's clearly capable of accomplishing.

The film's ending feels completely out-of-place, with Kyle suddenly a saint and then brought down by some random soldier.  We get no sense of irony regarding Kyle also having PTSD (like his alleged killer), and by-the-grace-of-God he could have been in the same spot as his murderer.  Instead, we just get a "rah-rah America" style ending to the film, which doesn't seem in service to even the pitiable movie that we've just sat through.  The film, so frequently tries to decide whether it's an action-packed look at American soldiers in battle (ala Lone Survivor) or a conservative look at the morals of war (ala The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty) instead becomes a jumbled mess of both, and in the end can't equal any of those three films in terms of excellence or critical thought.  The film occasionally bold, occasionally bordering on propaganda, is at its heart a failed attempt to meld the sort of unimpeachable hero of Eastwood's early career with the new morality required of wartime movies.