American Sniper—Movie Review

by Peter J. O'Connell

American Sniper. Runtime: 132 mins. Wide release: Jan. 16, 2015. Rating: R for strong and disturbing war violence, and language throughout, including some sexual references.

“The essential American soul is hard, stoic, isolate, and a killer.” --D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)

If Chris Kyle ever read this famous statement by the British author, he might have retorted something like this “You got a problem with that? I don't, when the killing is in defense of family and friends,

country and comrades.” Just a few years after his death, Chris Kyle has become an “essential American,” or as we say today, an “iconic figure.” He is the most lethal sniper in U.S. military history, with 160 “confirmed kills.”

Kyle's autobiography, American Sniper (written with Scott McEwan and Jim DeFelice), now has been made into a movie of the same name, produced and directed by Clint Eastwood. Eastwood is, of course, somewhat of an American icon himself because of his numerous roles as a “hard, stoic, isolate killer” in Westerns, cop dramas, and war movies. And Eastwood, on the evidence of his film, would agree—almost, but not quite—with Kyle's retort.

American Sniper alternates scenes of combat in Iraq with stateside scenes of Kyle's youth and then his married life. The youngest scene of Kyle is when he, like the hero of James Fenimore Cooper's classic The Deerslayer, goes hunting in the woods. (The scene is also a nod to the 1970s film about the Vietnam war, The Deer Hunter, as well as to Cooper.) Kyle's patriotic and churchgoing father, who teaches the boy about hunting and guns, also emphasizes to him the need to be protective of his family at all times and never to tolerate attacks either on them or on him.

Kyle takes up the archetypal American occupation of cowboy (and rodeo rider), but after U.S. embassies are attacked in 1998, he decides that the cowboy life is not what it used to be, and his job now is to fight those attacking America. Seeing his country as his extended family, Kyle becomes a sniper in the Navy SEALs and serves four deployments in Iraq.

The film's war scenes are grittily realistic as U.S. troops fight their way through the twisting alleyways and hallways of Iraq's dusty, rubble-strewn cities and towns, which seem like labyrinths where danger lurks around every corner and death may strike from any rooftop. The rooftops are, of course, the preferred perches of snipers, and it is while on them that Chris Kyle complies his ever-lengthening list of “kills” by means of stunning marksmanship—including one kill at a distance of a mile—and his ability to make the often-tough decision to shoot or not to shoot. Is the child or the woman in the burqa

 an enemy or an innocent? These moments of decision are grippingly depicted.

Actually, Kyle sees the war and his role in it as protecting the innocent as well as his comrades in combat and his country and family. As time goes on, though, other soldiers, including Kyle's own brother, start to question the war. Is it really helping America? Iraq? Anybody? At one point, a sandstorm  envelops the troops, and we feel that it is, in effect, an equivalent to the “fog of war.” And we sense Eastwood's “almost, but not quite” attitude mentioned above.

Bradley Cooper plays Chris Kyle to laconic perfection, projecting the American sniper's simultaneous      

mix of affability and intensity. Sienna Miller plays Taya, Kyle's wife. As the war grinds on, Taya becomes increasingly concerned both for Kyle's safety—particularly when he has cell phone conversations with her while engaged in combat—and about the fact that his commitment to the military may be leading him to neglect her and their children. The role of waiting, worried, weeping war wife often comes across in movies in a stereotypical way, but Miller is able to add an edginess to it that makes it her own. Both Cooper and Miller bear a striking physical resemblance to their real-life counterparts.

Eventually, Taya persuades Kyle to leave the military and return home. It is in Texas, however, rather than Iraq, that, with wrenching irony, the war hero meets his end—at the hands of a traumatized vet Kyle was attempting to help by means of shooting guns as therapy.

If you see American Sniper—and you should, for it is very well directed, produced and acted—be sure to stay for the closing credits, which superimpose actual footage of the quite moving tributes paid Chris Kyle by his fellow Texans as his funeral procession traveled across the Lone Star State for 200 miles.

“Footnote” to the film: Other films about snipers include Enemy at the Gates (2001), which centers around a “duel” between a Russian sniper and a German one at the siege of Stalingrad, and The Sniper (1952), a classic film noir that is a visually striking and psychologically astute attempt (one of the first in film) to explore the phenomenon of sexually motivated serial killings.