American Sniper

Clint Eastwood's American Sniper is a curious mixture of tall tale and tragedy, a purported-to-be-true story that has lately come under skeptical scrutiny. It represents, in a way, a kind of regression in what some had come to see as the director's late-blooming humanism -- it is far more Dirty Harry than Letters From Iwo Jima or even Gran Torino -- and the breeziest reading of the film is as a celebration of the warrior ethos. I don't know for certain what might inspire anyone to want to become an assassin executing human beings from the remove of a quarter-mile or more, but I suspect movies like this might play a part.

Still, it's undeniable that people like Navy SEAL sharpshooter Chris Kyle fulfill a necessary function. We're all obligated to acknowledge that there are rough men standing ready to do unpleasant things on our behalf and that without them our world would be a more difficult and dangerous place. Kyle is a problematic figure -- there's reason to suspect that his autobiography (written with Scott McEwen and Jim DeFelice), which serves as the source material for the film, is wildly embellished and unreliable. But he was also a highly decorated soldier, and probably the most lethal sniper in U.S. military history with 160 confirmed kills. (Kyle himself claimed more than 250 kills, which isn't out of the question, since most military snipers notch about as many unconfirmed kills as those that can be officially verified.)

As is his wont, Eastwood takes on the story in a straightforward, apparently conventional Hollywood fashion that camouflages his deeper intention -- the exploration, if not explosion, of masculine myth.

The film opens with Kyle (a remarkable mind-changing performance by Bradley Cooper, encased in a stolid, very un-Hollywoodlike physique) doing his job, which at the moment involves sighting down a potentially dangerous mother and child walking a dusty Fallujah street. While Kyle is aware of the moral implications of his task, his decision-making is reduced to flow-chart clarity. If this occurs, he will shoot. If it does not, he won't. In the moment, a sniper's job is not so different from that of the call center customer service rep -- he's working off a script.

Eastwood approaches his job with the same fraught matter-of-factness as Kyle/Cooper does; he suspends moral judgments and concentrates on the concrete details of his subject's work. And so the adjustment of sights, the tiny calibrated movements of his hands and eyes, the slowing of the pulse rate and the regulation of breath serve to build an almost hypnotic tension as the man makes himself an instrument of fate.

It's a bravura sequence, far more subtle than anything Eastwood has ever done as a director, and it nearly redeems the action movie tropes that eventually overwhelm this technically excellent if thematically muddled movie. We come to understand that Kyle has paid a price for all his killing, that while he has earned the sobriquet "The Legend," he doesn't revel in his bloody reputation. He's a man of faith, albeit one who's far more at home with his fellow warriors than stateside with his wife (a very good Sienna Miller) and family. Kyle has no problem acclimating himself to killing bad guys if it means saving American lives. Like Oskar Schindler, he only regrets he couldn't save them all.

Eastwood's trademark economical bluntness lends itself well to this sort of material -- Kyle's four tours in Iraq alternate with increasingly alienated stretches at home. In the field, he's competent and vividly profane, a man totally alive in the moment. Back in the States, he's dead-eyed and useless, preoccupied with the war he has temporarily left behind and that's stalking him as surely as he sighted down all those evildoers.

MovieStyle on 01/16/2015