Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Fri Jan 16, 2015 4:28 pm 
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Saving the men

The great interest of American Sniper is its protagonist, not because he is complex but because he is so simple. Even in early adolescence he's seen with his dad making his first kill with a hunting rifle. His father divides the world up into good animals and bad animals. The sacred calling is to be the one who gets the bad guys, the "savages." This is how the enemy is to be seen. And yet though Clint Eastwood is a conservative, he isn't monolithic here, he has his sensitivities.

There is certain ambiguity about the Iraq war combat operations as seen here through Chris Kyle, the late real life Navy Seal (based on his own book) played with conviction by Bradley Cooper (who got the movie made). A Navy Seals sniper credited with 160 kills, Chris Kyle was a hero to the men he protected. To his wife (an excellent Sienna Miller) who raises his children, for quite a while he's just an absentee dad. Like Jeremy Renner's bomb sapper SFC William James in The Hurt Locker, Kyle, though more handsome, in a big, bearish way (Cooper got much beefed up to look like Chris Kyle) Kyle seems simply "not there" to his wife when at home between tours. His life is over there. His duty is to protect his comrades over there.

Chris Kyle's combat operations are dramatized with plenty of state of the art realism, but they're not as tense and suspenseful as SFC James's bomb sapping. A sniper's work is harder to make interesting. There's a detachment about it. That's the horror of it. And more than once, Eastwood shows Kyle drawing a bead on a young Iraqi boy (one of these sequences is shown twice). It's a nerve wracking and morally crushing job, but in action terms it's inert. Luckily, Kyle, now known as "Legend" for his deadly accuracy, joins a team that fights door to door, invading buildings and houses. (Urban street warfare between ravaged buildings is seen better, in Syria, in the documentary Return to Homs.) But a sniper at work just looks through his binocs and his sight and pulls the trigger. Not as remote as the kills executed in the Mideast by techs Stateside, still there is a disconnect. The convenient antidote is that Kyle has an enemy adversary. His tours become a duel with an ace Iraqi sharpshooter known as Mustapha (Sammy Sheik), who competed in the Olympics. Mustapha differs from "Legend" only in having an Arab-looking face and a different hat (Kyle wears a totemic beat up baseball cap for luck).

Eastwood would not be as good a director as he is if he'd simply made a jingoistic tract about a combat hero. The material, in any case, doesn't allow that. The Chris Kyle story is full of the facts of modern American Middle East warfare. There have been a lot of movies about it, from Jarhead to Restrepo. (Few films other than David O. Russell's Three Kings succeed in nailing the equally important satirical or political aspects.) This one takes the viewer, if briefly, for a look at a few actual veterans seriously damaged by action, and hints at PTSD. The story has a surprise, ironic ending that came just before Cooper got work going on this movie: Kyle leaves the house to spend time with another veteran he's "trying to help," and (end titles tell you) he got shot by him. This is only a hint at how much and how badly the wars have come home, but it's there, and this aspect seems to have been particularly important to Bradley Cooper.

Is the jingoistic aspect of "the most lethal sniper in U.S. history" just a rack on which Cooper can hang his hat of bad news about war? Were he and Eastwood at odds? But Cooper too had to have been deeply into the gung ho military aspects: he did his weight lifting and his pushups and his Navy Seals training simulations. Like Kathryn Bigelow, Clint Eastwood (and Bradley Cooper) seem utterly seduced by the glamour and excitement of modern U.S. warfare, even as they blend in the downsides. For some of us the glamour may be hard to see: this may seem just like extraordinarily hard and dangerous and damaging work in a cause that many of the veterans (including one of Kyle's closest buddies, as shown in a letter read at the latter's funeral) come to see as futile and cruel. The ugly, soulless side of war is shaped by the invented conflicts (attacking Afghanistan and Iraq as a response to 9/11) and the high tech methods of the fighting. If you want old fashioned human war drama, go back to World War II, as David Ayer did last year in his fine but underappreciated Fury. There is something crude about Bradley Cooper even before he got beefed up that cannot match Brad Pitt's charisma and nuance.

The ambiguity that appears at some point also begins to fade again when Kyle goes back for a fourth and final tour in Iraq and finally gets Mustapha. Before the operation is over, when it's not even sure Kyle isn't mortally wounded, he calls his wife on a satellite phone to shout that he can come back now. (Phone calls are another way of injecting drama into the isolated sniper life.) Of course his war's not over; it's never over. It goes on in his head watching a dead TV screen back home. It's only the doctor at the VA hospital who gives him and the movie an out by suggesting to him there are comrades right down the hall he can help save. That was the tougher job, in the end.

American Sniper, 132 mins. debuted at the AFI Fest in November 2014 with limited release Christmas 2014. It was on some critics' ten best lists and received six Oscar nominations (including Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay, Editing, Sound Editing, Sound Mixing) with a Metacritic rating of 72%. US and UK wide release began 16 January 2015 (France 18 February).

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.


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