Clint Eastwood has always struck me as a far more interesting director than actor. Perhaps this is because I was too young to appreciate his work as the icon of 1960's masculinity; or perhaps he’s realized over the years that puppeteers have more to say than puppets. And American Sniper, Eastwood’s latest examination of the lone Western hero, has plenty to say.
Based on the autobiography of Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, labeled the “most lethal sniper in US military history,” American Sniper chronicles Kyle’s four tours of duty in Iraq and the subsequent impact on his personal life. The story itself is a rather tragic but straightforward examination of war, its takeaways about the physical and psychological tolls exacted on the front lines fairly blunt. But the directing and acting and cinematography is far better executed than the script is written, making the film feel more impressive while you’re in the trenches than in hindsight.
Kyle’s rationale for his actions boils down to “I kill one person before many people get killed.” It’s this split-second decision going on behind the scope of a sniper rifle that constructs the tension in most of the war sequences. From a cinematic standpoint, the battle sequences are riveting and frighteningly real; from a storytelling standpoint, this maxim loses steam. The implication behind Kyle’s worldview, and the perspective adopted by the film overall, is that war is black and white. The targets in your scope are evil; we are righteous. It’s either us or them. War naturally forces us to make such difficult distinctions -- why else would we send human lives into danger if not to fight for what we so steadfastly believe in? -- but from a storytelling perspective, war is anything but black and white.
American Sniper does an admirable job of constructing the narrative from Kyle’s perspective, but it fails to illuminate the complexities of the greater forces of war. On multiple occasions, Kyle refers to the Iraqis -- whether they are enemy combatants or terrified families -- as “savages.” From what he’s seen, it is wholly understandable why he would perceive them as such. But does warfare reduce a soldier’s personal opinions to universal truths? After the death of of his close friends in the field of combat, Kyle dispatches from the military base with the intention of killing more Iraqis and seeking retribution. But shouldn’t engaging in warfare come across as fighting for something more than the settlement of personal vendettas?
Kyle, as depicted in this film, is as patriotic as he is sorely naive. He is unquestionably doing admirable things in the service of his country; but the film eschews any examination of the military policies or political machinations that have sent Kyle into the line of fire in the first place. And perhaps more alarming, Kyle himself shows no curiosity in those forces. Perhaps it’s fair that American Sniper focuses on one man and I shouldn’t expect it to examine such larger cogs of the machine, but I believe it’s necessary to question the motives that have sent loved ones into a war that, with each passing year, has proven fruitless and ultimately unnecessary.
Early in the film, Kyle watches on TV as the planes crash into the World Trade Center. The next scene is Kyle enlisting in the Navy. Eastwood’s depiction of Kyle’s motivation here is not only fictionalized, but factually obtuse. Even Bush, in all his wartime histrionics, didn’t purport the Iraq War to be a retributive military strike, instead using the guise of searching for WMDs as the reason. And yet, Eastwood leverages 9/11 as the reason America entered the war and perhaps more unsettling, as the reason Kyle enlists in the military (to be fair, a retaliatory strike after 9/11 is the most common explanation, especially after the claims of Iraq’s WMDs began ringing increasingly false).
Politics aside, there are some odd notes throughout that distract American Sniper from the story it seemingly wants to tell. The generous embellishment of Mustafa, a villainous Iraqi foil to Kyle, seems unnecessary and clumsy. We should understand the stakes of warfare and personal rationale for killing through Kyle’s own perspective, not through the manifestation of an uber-evil enemy sniper. Leave the arch-enemy stuff to the Marvel movies. Additionally, the severely abbreviated respites when Kyle returns to his family in Texas come across as perfunctory and hollow, as if Eastwood felt obligated to check in with the grieving wife in between the tours of duty that he found infinitely more interesting.
The film’s imbalance between the warfield and the home life threatens to derail anything not concerning Kyle peering through a sniper scope. Eastwood’s disinterest in Kyle’s family life in Texas is encapsulated in the role of his wife, Taya. Repeatedly, she is asked to cry and sob and grieve while attempting to talk to her husband on the phone. Move over Claire Danes, Sienna Miller should win every award for her crying. But more than that, Taya is reduced to recycling clunky lines of the “Even when you’re here, you’re not here” variety. She exists less as a character than as an emotional crutch for Kyle’s turmoil. If there is one dramatic purpose to this imbalance, it’s that Kyle’s normal life now clearly exists in the war zone, leaving his young children to grow up without him.
The film ends on a somber note, as a title card informs us that, after his final tour of duty, Chris Kyle was killed in 2013 while helping fellow veterans adjust to civilian life. It seems to me that the more fascinating struggle in Kyle’s life was not his stints in Iraq, but his postwar life and the therapeutic social work he’d begun doing with other veterans in Texas. But as the possibility of a richer, more complex examination of a soldier’s life blossoms, Eastwood ends the film. It seems that, not unlike Kyle peering through the scope of his sniper rifle, Eastwood’s focus remains singularly on the battlefield across the world and not on the greater struggles at home.
