Clint Eastwood (2014)
One thing Clint Eastwood can’t be accused of is lack of productivity. Now in his eighty-fifth year, Eastwood has directed thirteen feature films since the turn of the millennium: American Sniper is his second release of 2014. It’s a return to form after the feeble, embarrassing Jersey Boys and, before that, the mess of J Edgar (2011). In fact, thanks largely to Bradley Cooper in the title role, American Sniper is, in spite of its faults, the most worthwhile Eastwood movie I’ve seen since The Bridges of Madison County, nearly twenty years ago. (That too featured a lead performance, from Meryl Streep, and surprising chemistry between her and Eastwood, which rose above the film’s many shortcomings.) American Sniper is adapted, by Jason Hall, from the autobiography of the late Chris Kyle, a US Navy Army SEAL. Kyle’s book is modestly entitled American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in US Military History. According to Wikipedia, he ‘accumulated 160 confirmed kills out of 255 probable kills’ over four tours of duty during the Iraq War. Kyle received an honourable discharge in 2009; his autobiography was published in early 2012; Warner Bros acquired the film rights a few months later with Bradley Cooper set to produce and to star. In February 2013, Kyle and another man, Chad Littlefield, were shot dead at a shooting range in Erath County, Texas by Eddie Ray Routh, a former US marine, who was thought to be suffering from, and whom Kyle and Littlefield were trying to help deal with, post-traumatic stress disorder. (Routh is currently awaiting trial for the murders.)
American Sniper begins with Chris Kyle, on his first tour of duty in Iraq, taking aim to shoot a boy in the streets of Fallujah – a boy whom Kyle judges (correctly) to be carrying an explosive device that he’s about to throw. As Kyle pulls the trigger, Clint Eastwood cuts to another gunshot, in a wood in Texas: the child Chris (Cole Konis), roughly the same age here as the Iraqi boy in Fallujah, has successfully shot a deer. Chris’s father (Ben Reed) commends his son’s marksmanship, telling him he has a rare gift. We see the Kyles in church – father, mother (Elise Robertson), Chris and his younger brother Jeff (Luke Sunshine) – then at home, at a family meal. The father eclipses the priest’s church sermon with one of his own: in this world, he says, people are either sheep or wolves or sheepdogs and the Kyle boys must be sheepdogs. We’re then taken forward to Chris Kyle’s mid-twenties: he’s a bronco rodeo rider and works on a ranch. The way Eastwood presents it, Chris’s decision to walk into a military recruiting office seems to be prompted by a mixture of breaking up with his girlfriend, who he’s caught with another man, and watching television news reports of the bombing of the US embassies in Dar-es-Salaam and Nairobi. (The Wikipedia entry on Kyle notes that he had to give up rodeo riding because of a severe arm injury, which also resulted in his being turned down by the military at his first attempt to enlist.) Although these early scenes are flat-footed and obvious, they do more than serve their immediate purpose. The fact that the moralising Kyle père is never seen again is both a relief and dramatically effective: his words round the dinner table echo throughout the film. It’s not explained what he thought when his son was trying to be a cowboy but there’s little that follows in American Sniper to suggest that Chris Kyle didn’t continue to accept his father’s worldview: in joining the US military and going to Iraq, Chris sees himself as a sheepdog – ‘looking after our own’. Late on in the film, he tells a psychiatrist that he doesn’t know how many people he’s killed but is haunted by how many more (American) lives his bullets might have been able to save.
When Chris’s unit first arrives in Iraq, one of their number likens Fallujah to the Wild West. Clint Eastwood, steeped in Western cinema as both a performer and a director, evidently concurs: the conflict in Iraq in which Chris Kyle takes part is presented as a series of shootouts, leading up to a climactic one. As usual in an Eastwood film, those corny sequences at the start of American Sniper aren’t the only ones. There’s an awkward and improbable meeting on an airstrip between Chris, returning to Iraq, and his younger brother, now a soldier too and a reluctant one: Keir O’Donnell is excessively weedy as the adult Jeff Kyle – he might as well be wearing an ‘I AM A SHEEP’ badge. Whenever Chris’s wife Taya (Sienna Miller) phones him in Iraq, she always manages to choose a time when gunfire is being exchanged with insurgent snipers. These action sequences are nevertheless strong. The fast and frightening cutting (by Joel Cox and Gary D Roach) intensifies the shock of seeing lives ending suddenly and the images of physical damage done to both sides of the conflict: the repetition of the images doesn’t diminish their impact. The narrative structure is very simple – Eastwood and the screenwriter Jason Hall progress through the four tours of duty and the marital tension between Chris and Taya that increases with each one of those tours and is dramatised in the breaks between them – but Eastwood handles the marital scenes with more feeling for human complexity than he normally does. It’s a cliché that the two other SEALs who emerge as characters die at ‘ironic’ moments: Biggles (Jake McDorman) is talking about his forthcoming wedding; Lee (Luke Grimes), who has been ambivalent about the war effort, suddenly forces himself into gung-ho action. In less stressed sequences involving the soldiers, Eastwood and his actors create a credible rhythm of macho camaraderie, brusqueness and mutual concern.
American Sniper has been criticised both for being jingoistic and for being unpatriotic, while David Denby (overpraising Clint Eastwood, as usual) describes it as ‘a devastating pro-war movie and a devastating anti-war movie’. The story’s focus on Chris Kyle’s courage and professionalism, in combination with Bradley Cooper’s inherent likableness, naturally turns Kyle into a good guy. It’s possible that Kyle’s untimely death left Cooper freer in his characterisation than he might otherwise have been: it also prompts Eastwood to confirm Kyle’s heroism at the end of the film. News footage of the actual funeral procession, with hundreds of people lining the route, and of Kyle’s burial at the Texas State Cemetery in Austin, are wholeheartedly commemorative and the last things we see before the closing credits. The emphasis in the warfare sequences is on what US forces had to face in Iraq – the obvious insurgent enemy, the civilians who may be terrorists in disguise. American Sniper isn’t politically one-way traffic, though, and while it could be argued that the film’s duty-to-family-vs-duty-to-homeland conflict is a sentimental construct, it doesn’t play out as such. The resonant homily of Kyle’s father, delivered in a domestic setting, complicates the meaning of looking after one’s own. Eastwood’s and Jason Hall’s demonstration that being a sheepdog is not as simple in practice as Chris Kyle would like it to be gets overworked in the closing stages. Not only is the family dog a collie but, when Kyle is first discharged from the military and finding it psychologically hard to adjust to life at home, the animal finds itself on the receiving end of his anger. In the meantime, though, the difficulties in Chris’s relationship with Taya, although they’re unsurprising, have been realised in scenes featuring plenty of well-written dialogue and fine acting. In the very last domestic scene, although it too is well played by Bradley Cooper and Sienna Miller, Eastwood telegraphs, as Chris leaves the house with the man who’ll kill him, that Taya will never again see her husband alive. There are better illustrations in earlier sequences of the mental trauma suffered by military vets – particularly an unnerving encounter in a shop between Chris and his son (Max Charles) and a disabled but effusively grateful ex-marine (Alvin Cowan).
Chris and Taya first meet in a bar, while he’s still training as a SEAL. She tells him she would never date a fighting man; when he reminds her of this a few minutes later, she claims that she said she’d never marry one. Sienna Miller is very convincing throughout as someone who always had doubts about being a military wife but who’s drawn to and continues to love this particular fighting man. Bradley Cooper gets better and better. His Oscar nomination for this performance, although it came as a surprise, is well deserved (it’s his third nomination on the trot). He bulked up alarmingly for the role – his neck is much wider than his head – but the resulting physique is very expressive of the character he’s playing. Cooper’s Chris Kyle looks physically indomitable – heroic in a real, unglamorous way; his bulk also suggests a blinkered mind. At the same time, Cooper has a marvellous emotional sensitivity. There’s an ease and intimacy between him and Sienna Miller from the start: you see and believe that Chris and Taya have disagreements but that their essential feelings for each other enable them, at least in the early stages of the relationship, to get over these and be laughing together an instant after the disagreement began. Bradley Cooper’s fusion of professional nervelessness and inner agitation comes through brilliantly in a sequence in which Kyle kills an insurgent sharpshooter, an Iraqi boy picks up the dead man’s rifle, and Kyle mutters, repeatedly and increasingly desperately, ‘Drop the weapon … drop the weapon’ – all the time keeping his own rifle’s sights on a child who, if he doesn’t oblige, will be the American sniper’s next corpse.
16 January 2015
