After his bizarre performance at the Republican National Convention in 2012, in which he addressed an “invisible” President Obama and blamed him for all that was wrong in the country, it seemed as if Clint Eastwood had finally become the ultimate poster boy for conservative values in the United States. Which wasn’t surprising, after all the films that made him a movie star all involved him wielding guns and perpetuating the idea that the all-American man had to seek justice only by oppressing minorities. Similarly his work as a director seems fixated on the idea that liberal progress (female empowerment, equal opportunity and immigration) can only bring tragedy.
Clint, as a filmmaker, is at his best when he allows himself to be critical of elements that must have kept him up at night, wondering if he was being “un-American” for having such thoughts. We see this in the severely underrated Flags of Our Fathers which had him explore what is it that truly makes a hero, and even in Gran Torino, which starts as a reactionary tale of racism, only to turn into a bittersweet acceptance of things changing whether the older generations like it or not.
American Sniper, based on Chris Kyle’s autobiographical account of his tours in Iraq, where he became the most lethal sniper in U.S. history with 160 confirmed kills (out of more than 250 alleged kills), had all the makings of becoming Clint’s entry in the “Murica fuck yeah!” canon of blind patriotic films which have more in common with WWII propaganda than sophisticated modern cinema; surprisingly it turns out to be a sobering account of the horrors of war, and how not even heroes leave the battlefield unscathed.
Bradley Cooper stars as Kyle, whom we first meet on a rooftop as he targets an Iraqi woman and child who are carrying a bomb aimed at an American convoy, as the camera zooms in on him (Tom Stern’s cinematography evoking 1970s thrillers) almost penetrating his head, we realize that Eastwood is trying to make us empathize with him, what would we do in his shoes? Would we shoot a woman and child who were threatening the people they considered threats? Or would we follow orders and eliminate them? If so, how would we be able to retain our humanity?
The response to the last question is that perhaps once we enlisted, we would also have signed away our soul. The film, if anything else, chronicles Kyle’s descent into limbo, he goes from being a wide-eyed young man with dreams of serving his country, to a mass of a man, without any sense of purpose. Cooper aptly ages through his eyes, when the film begins he’s all smiles and movie star charm, his eyes shining bright like jewels, his toothy smile, all matinee idol-like. By the time the film ends, he seems to have doubled his size in muscles, but his eyes have stopped shining, they’re opaque vessels.
Cooper’s committed performance might very well be the best work he’s done onscreen, as he lets Kyle’s idealism slowly turn into disappointment. We see his mental struggles every time the camera focuses on him, as he looks into his weapon’s sight, expecting to find his soul staring back at him.
While the film works just fine as a character study, and an action drama with some truly volatile sequences (edited expertly by Joel Cox and Gary D. Roach), the film’s most surprising “twist” comes halfway through, when a simple moment turns the film’s ideological center upside down. As Kyle’s nemesis in Iraq, a Syrian sniper known only as Mustafa (Sammy Sheik) prepares to leave his home for yet another showdown with Kyle, we realize, that first of all, not only does this “villain” have a home, as the camera pans and follows him outside the door we see his wife and child, and the camera lingers for a few seconds on a picture hanging from the wall showing a proud Mustafa at a sports event. This miniature moment speaks volumes about the way in which Eastwood has manipulated us all along, just to test how far our biases would go, and that in fact American Sniper might very well be an antiwar picture.
Did we at any moment stop to wonder if this man had a family? Did we even conceive such a possibility? By pointing out that Mustafa is Kyle’s equal in more than one way, we can’t help but think about the repercussions that war has in the soldiers who live to tell the tale. How PTSD has become a disease that steals the souls of those who thought they were making a difference. The last part of the film has Kyle trying to fit back into American life, but failing to have a moment's peace. Kyle eventually met a tragic demise at the hands of a fellow veteran who couldn’t cope with the demons he brought back from the war, but Eastwood suggests that he had been dead long before his return.
