Film

Culture Wars Aside, Is Clint Eastwood’s ‘American Sniper’ Actually Any Good?

Well, yes and no. Mostly no.

by Glenn Dunks  23 January 2015

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It seems not a week goes by lately where a film doesn’t become a lightning rod for controversy.

In early December we had a rush of pieces (rightfully) clamouring to criticise Morten Tyldum’s The Imitation Game, for rendering its famous subject’s homosexuality moot.

By Christmas the internet erupted over The Interview, and after that there was a brief moment when the subject of Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher (2014), Olympic wrestler Mark Schultz, went into a Twitter rage over is-it-there-or-isn’t-it gay subtext.

Recently, op-ed pages were spent on Selma and allegations that it grossly misrepresented President Lyndon Johnson’s involvement in the civil rights movement; later, there was controversy over the film’s perceived racist snubbing from many high-profile Oscar categories.

This week it’s Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper’s turn; the biopic, starring Bradley Cooper as Iraqi war veteran Chris “The Legend” Kyle, brewed an almighty storm over morality and ethics in representations of war, while earning so much money at the box office that cinemas should officially be classified as army recruitment halls.

Many of the articles that have sprung up appear to be written by people who do not watch films professionally, like Piers Morgan at the Daily Mail – or, in the case of Dennis Jett of The New Republic, even by people who haven’t seen the film in question. It’s a worrying trend, but hardly a new one, and certainly not one relegated to just the movies, as Slate’s “The Year of Outrage” infograph attests to. What makes the debate over Clint Eastwood’s film so tediously frustrating is that it’s less a debate over facts and the representation of events and people than it is a debate over ideology, in which viewers have clearly defined battle-grounds that are unlikely to waver even after having seen the film.

For some, Kyle is a sadistic and cruel mass-murderer, glorified by a conservative film industry, and held up as a national hero for committing acts that some in Hollywood have called cowardly; the film itself — centred around Kyle and his four tours of Iraq following the 1998 United States embassy bombings in Tanzania, and September 11 — has been portrayed as reminiscent of WWII propaganda films.

For others, like Sarah Palin and the cronies at Fox News, Kyle is a patriot and worthy of every minute (132 to be exact) that Eastwood devotes to him.

Culture Wars Aside: Is The Film Good, Or Bad?

With all of this, it’s easy for films to get lost within a labyrinth of hand-wringing. What of the film itself? Is American Sniper actually any good?

Well, yes and no. Mostly no.

Despite my own personal feelings about the film’s subject, I can certainly admit that the film has many well-directed scenes that boil with tension, such as two separate scenes in which Kyle must weigh the consequences of shooting a child. In retrospect they’re manipulative and only amplify the image of him as a hero, but in the moment they’re effective.

One especially great sequence involves a military shoot-out as a sandstorm approaches, eventually shrouding the soldiers in darkness and dust as the pop-pop-pop of their guns echoes around. (It’s no surprise two of the film’s six Oscar nominations were in the sound categories.) Eastwood is 84 years old and while many of his recent efforts have been ghastly disasters – Jersey Boys (2014), J. Edgar (2011), and Hereafter (2010) are particularly terrible – one can feel the effort he has put into this film. Perhaps it was the threat of violence from Chris Kyle’s father if Eastwood “disrespected” his son’s legacy that did it?

Not all of Kyle’s 160 confirmed kills are shown, presumably because not all of them were as clean as the ones we do see. Such additions would have given the character and the film dimensions that are otherwise not there.

Where the film stumbles is in the screenplay by Jason Hall, an actor known best for playing Devon MacLeish on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and for whom American Sniper is only his third produced script. Adapted from the autobiographic bestseller of the same name by Kyle, Jim DeFelice, and Scott McEwen, the screenplay is a strange mish-mash of concepts and ideas.

For all the talk of American Sniper’s pro-war ideology, the most troubling aspect I felt was that the film doesn’t appear to have an ideology at all.

From one scene to another, the script dithers between being critical of the way the American government treats its returning soldiers, and fetishising the pro-nationalism driven at its core. One scene featuring a fellow Iraq vet, played by Broadway star and openly gay actor from HBO comedy Looking Jonathan Groff, even finds these themes being juggled mid-scene, as the younger soldier salutes his hero before Kyle flinches at the distant sound of an electric tool. It comes off as less shades of grey than just sloppiness.

Meanwhile, acknowledgements of soldier PTSD frequently manifest themselves in the least nuanced ways possible, and in the film’s final act prove remarkably easy to overcome for Chris Kyle. I guess that’s just because he’s such a big strong man that not even the horrors of war can keep him from being a good father and husband? The film doesn’t seem particularly interested in the PTSD-ravaged part of the SEAL’s story, glossing over the effect it had on his wife and his life back in America, preferring instead to repeatedly go back to his tours of Iraq and scenes of violence and horror. Give the audiences what they want, obviously.

In the movie tie-in re-release of Kyle’s book, a post script headlined ‘From the Depth of Grief, a Legend’ by screenwriter Jason Hall details how he had handed in the screenplay literally one day before Kyle was murdered on a shooting range by another PTSD-affected soldier that he was helping. “I felt it was a good first draft,” he writes — and the final product shows he didn’t want to tinker with it too much.

In one of the final scenes, Kyle is seen being romantic with his wife one last time, playfully chasing his daughter around their home, and rather presciently telling his son that he is “the man of the house” and the protector of his women while he’s out for the day. The on-screen text informs us of what happened on February 2, 2013 in one single sentence, followed by stock news footage of the 200-mile funeral procession towards Austin. It was in these moments, more than the scenes of heroic wartime combat, I became convinced American Sniper was more concerned with myth-building than genuinely telling a story of the harmful effects of war on young, healthy men.

Fake Babies, Booty Shorts, And Sienna Miller

Whether the film is intentionally glamourising Chris Kyle or not is something only Clint Eastwood can answer, but it’s undeniable that a wide segment of America have taken the film as a cause célèbre. There are reviews by critics who don’t flinch at appropriating the man’s–and therefore the film’s–language, in which every person of Arab descent is a “savage”. And there’s a whole, terrifying sub-world of Twitter reveling in that same violent dialogue.

Sniper lacks the intrigue and grandiosity of Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (2012), or the intimate personal edge of Camp X-Ray (2014), about a Guantanamo Bay guard who becomes gradually disillusioned, after building a friendship with a detainee. Those two films were fronted by women, Jessica Chastain and Kristen Stewart respectively, a gender Eastwood’s film is completely uninterested in. An early girlfriend is thrown out in a comically bad fashion, while Kyle’s mother is seen early and never again. Kyle’s eventual wife, played by a vanilla Sienna Miller, is a fairly anonymous creature who presumably ditches whatever career she had (it’s never mentioned) in order to pump out children, and is only shown fleetingly when he’s not around.

With both this and Foxcatcher (2014), Miller has perfected the “wife crying on phone” subgenre of roles for women in Hollywood.

At least what few women there are aren’t sexually objectified ala the playboy bunnies in Apocalypse Now (1979), a nonetheless much better film than American Sniper. I personally would have liked more of Bradley Cooper in his deliciously soaked, tight short-shorts, but then Eastwood isn’t that sort of director.

Hilariously, he is the kind of director who will insert multiple scenes involving an incredibly fake baby doll that Cooper and Miller must lug around in an impossible attempt to make it look real. In all of the preaching to the choir of the film’s politics, it’s #FakeBaby that’s inspiring some of the most entertaining coverage — like this list of the best inanimate objects in movies, and this collection of links from Indiewire.

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American Sniper is in cinemas now.

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Glenn Dunks is a freelance writer from Melbourne, who is currently based in New York City. He tweets from @glenndunks.