Clint Eastwood’s latest take to the box-office paints a war story of a different color.
American Sniper is a biopic of the late “Legend” Chris Kyle, a United States Navy SEAL proclaimed to be the most lethal sniper recorded in history, played by Bradley Cooper. He is torn between serving his country, his comrades and his family.
Like most of Eastwood’s directorial work, the film unfolds in one straight shot after the next. It’s clean-cut, primitively executed work.
What Eastwood and Cooper brilliantly accomplish is introducing their audience to a new conversation about patriotism.
Kyle fits the archetype of the soldier with a conscience; he’s more human than machine as opposed to the meat-hungry, rack-up-kills, kind of jarhead.
He holds no pride in his record-breaking headcount. He is glorified by his comrades, but he doesn’t see where glory fits in a time of war.
For once, we see a soldier who doesn’t simply succumb to his surroundings simply because that’s what he needs to do to survive. Instead, Kyle’s coping mechanism is composure—until he returns home.
He meets Taya Renae, played by Sienna Miller, at a bar, and they marry. She takes on an interesting role that draws us in at first, but eventually, she seems to disappear.
Eastwood attempts to withhold us from the time Kyle spends at home in order to portray the void that is his family life.
To the detriment of the film, the audience loses out on a lot of the emotional investment filmmakers dabble with to cement meaning.
Sure, Kyle was supposed to be hopelessly out of touch with his home-life, but instead of feeling like he spent four years at home, the film makes it seem as if he only enjoyed a few weekends postwar.
If there’s one thing Eastwood is trying to depict, it’s that alive or dead, every soldier is a casualty of war.
Post-traumatic stress disorder is almost a character itself in the movie. Helping others after being discharged was Kyle’s only way of helping himself—a common side-effect of human nature.
Eastwood’s cinematic portrayal of the man who was Chris Kyle, rather than the hero who was Chris Kyle, quintessentially saved this movie from being tastelessly candy-coated.
He is not trying to show you the biggest explosions, the most extreme war tragedy or play into tropes of the heavy-artillery “badass,” a cult icon made out of carnage.
By no means does the film give off the essence that Eastwood is high-fiving the statue of liberty and waving the American flag in a pick-up truck. Instead the audience is left with the somber reality of PTSD, a corrupt, never-ending war and the hard truth that there might actually be more happening beyond our insignificant bubble of a people fixated on screens.
RATING: 3/5 stars
RELEASE: Jan. 16
