With the buzz from its six Oscar nominations and its wide theatrical release last Friday, American Sniper was the biggest box office hit over the weekend. The Clint Eastwood-directed, Bradley Cooper-starring war film earned $119 million worldwide, nearly doubling its $60 million budget. And it shouldn't be a surprise: with an established, handsome leading man in the starring role, a famed director at the helm, and a plot based on the true story of Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, who had the distinction of being the deadliest sniper in U.S. military history during his four tours in Iraq, American Sniper seems like a natural hit. Not surprisingly, the film has also garnered controversy because of its subject matter, and critics have debated the question of its political leanings with much fervor in the last week.
It's here where I make a confession: I really enjoy Clint Eastwood's directorial efforts, and I say that as someone who staunchly leans to the left politically. Despite his conservative stance, I have always seen Eastwood as a remarkable filmmaker. I even have a soft spot for Gran Torino, which has been dismissed for the director's star turn as an unapologetically racist Korean War vet who comes to the rescue of his Hmong neighbors. It can be seen as another "white savior" narrative, or it could be read as a surprisingly nuanced look at a racist mentality. As someone who grew up in the South and have interacted with various shades of racism, that form of à la carte prejudice rang especially true. There are, after all, racists whom I love, because they are the people around whom I grew up; that's not an easy to thing to acknowledge or live with, but it doesn't mean it isn't an uncomfortable truth.
I expected to have mixed feelings going into American Sniper. Coming from a conservative background in which I was seemingly the lone silent liberal in a sea of outspoken Republicans, waving their flags and affixing yellow ribbons to their cars and cheering on military operations in the Middle East (while I, in the comfort of my college town, protested those efforts in a very brief period of outspoken political activism), I knew I would recognize a lot of the characters in the film. And I found what I expected: those who unequivocally supported the U.S. presence in the Middle East, men who saw the terrorist attacks on 9/11 as a call to duty, and a very familiar Us vs. Them mentality.
The latter comes very quickly in the film, when a young Chris Kyle and his brother are instructed by his father on the following lesson. There are three kinds of people in the world: sheep, wolves, and sheep dogs. The sheep follow blindly, the wolves are predators, and the sheep dogs act as protectors. Wrapped up in this analogy are layers of masculine ideals as well as notions of black and white. Getting this lecture after Kyle's younger brother is bullied at school, he learns at an early age what will be his driving force throughout his life: "we take care of our own."
That's what attracts him to become a Navy SEAL, and his talent as a marksman brings him legendary status almost immediately — even if Kyle himself struggles with the moral ambiguity of his job. His first kills, a young boy and his mother, are teased in the film's trailer — a scene Eastwood shows us twice in the film's first act. It's a harrowing image, both of an American sniper shooting down what would appear to be civilians if they weren't carrying a Russian grenade. But quickly we learn that Kyle has a job to do: he is there to protect his fellow men who, whether you agree with their mission or not, are in Iraq to do their jobs, too.
As Kyle goes back and forth between his home (which he shares with his wife, Taya, played wonderfully by Sienna Miller) and Iraq, his personal struggles with right and wrong become a major subtext. This is a subtext not present in Kyle's autobiography on which the film is based; in his book, Kyle brags not only of killing over 200 people in Iraq (versus his 160 confirmed kills), but also of shooting looters after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, killing two men in Texas who tried to steal his truck, and punching former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura in a bar. Those claims are unverified; Ventura was awarded $1.8 dollars last July in a defamation suit against Kyle's estate.
Kyle's book also boasts about his hatred for the Iraqi people, who he calls "savages" (a word that gets a very brief, very quiet mention in Eastwood's film). Many critics found Kyle to be an incredibly violent, racist individual. The film version of Kyle, who has a larger sense of humane sensitivity beneath Bradley Cooper's hulking body and his kind, blue eyes, does not exhibit those racist notions. While the film doesn't make great strides to depict the Iraqi characters, most of whom are soldiers, as completely barbaric — although it doesn't put much effort into not showing them in such a light. They are simply the enemy in a film that follows the familiar Us vs. Them rhetoric. They are cold-blooded killers, while the Hollywood version of Kyle is consumed with protecting his brothers in arms.
That's the little bit that I could read as propaganda — presenting a man who only saw the world in terms of black and white with Eastwood's surprising sense of understanding the ambiguous gray areas. (It is, after all, one of Eastwood's biggest interests in terms of narrative, and that his film about the Japanese perspective of World War II, Letters From Iwo Jima, is more humanistic and a better film than his American counterpart, Flags of Our Fathers, is a testament to that.) Eastwood sees war as a troubling truth that leaves as many emotional wounds as physical ones, and American Sniper brings that to light in its third act as Kyle tries desperately to leave what he saw in Iraq away from his home and family.
What Eastwood does well in American Sniper is present facts for his audience to interpret any way they see fit, which is why I don't buy the film as a piece of propaganda. If you go into the film thinking that American soldiers deserve unequivocal support simply for the job they did overseas, then you'll find the film to be an enthusiastic take on American heroism. If, like me, you are dubious of what our efforts in Iraq actually did but still maintain a support for the soldiers who went to fight for us because they felt they were doing the right thing — either because of their own ideologies or because they were following ideals that were instilled in them by their loved ones, their culture, their leaders — then you will probably see a film that depicts with respectful honesty the events of our country's recent history.
Despite it being based on a true story, American Sniper is a fictional account that paints the source material with broad strokes. As a character study, however, I find it fascinating. Bradley Cooper's Chris Kyle is heroic, for sure, and lacks some of the more controversial aspects of the real-life figure. In American Sniper, Kyle is an everyman — he is devoted to his country and struggles with prioritizing that patriotic dedication over his marital responsibilities. When he's about to leave for his fourth tour in Iraq, his wife tells him that she needs him to stay, that he's selfish for returning to his fellow soldiers when his wife and his children need him. You can read that either way — I, personally, have more sympathy for Taya. But when you're a man whose job involves protecting others from violence, returning home and giving up that job — which you feel is your calling, something you have to do — is difficult. That's just one part of the sad truth of American Sniper: the battlefield was the workplace, and being a marksman was Chris Kyle's vocation. After just nine years of service, one can feel empathy for someone who feels like a failure for his sudden, early retirement.
That Chris Kyle was murdered not in Iraq but within the borders of the United States — by a fellow veteran, no less, whom Kyle was volunteering to help with his PTSD — is the film's tragic, and ironic, ending. It's clear that Eastwood didn't particularly know how to handle the ending; it happened after Kyle's book was finished and the film was in pre-production, and it feels tacked onto the movie's climax. It also serves as an odd coda, revealed through a single title card that indicates how Kyle was killed before the credits roll next to footage of Kyle's funeral service at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas, and the 200-mile funeral procession from Midlothian to Austin where he was buried. I could see how a critic could see this as melodrama-as-propaganda, but I see it as misguided direction as opposed to manipulation. Had Kyle lived, the ending would have had an entirely different tone.
Ultimately, I found American Sniper to be a deeply flawed film, but not a dishonest or calculated one. It presented the truth in the way in which Chris Kyle and many like him saw it — that it was their duty to serve their country against our enemies. What Eastwood's film doesn't do is make the argument that they were right or wrong; the events took place, and it's our job, as viewers, to come to our own philosophical conclusions.
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Photos: Everett Collection
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