The perpetual outrage machine of twitter has been running hard against American Sniper. Now, while outrage on twitter is its default position, and therefore unsurprising, I found it curious that that a filmmaker as sophisticated as Clint Eastwood was copping it.
For a conservative, Eastwood has always taken remarkably nuanced and thoughtful positions in his work as a director. Unforgiven was a meditation on the ugliness of killing, and a direct repudiation of his early career in Spaghetti Westerns. Mystic River was a powerful statement against both vigilantism and the earlier moral absolutism of his Dirty Harry movies.
(click on the PDF icon, above right, if you prefer a black lettering on a white background).
Clint Eastwood also has taken an interest in the working class and working poor to an extent that no other US director has 
come close to. Million Dollar Baby is one of the few serious films about a working poor woman (and no, Pretty Woman doesn’t count) and possibly the only serious film about a female boxer ever made in the US (a film, by the way, that makes a strong argument in support of euthanasia). Mystic River was set in a working-class town, and Gran Torino was set in a poor 
Hmong community in Michigan.
In short: Clint Eastwood has chosen more diverse subject matter and taken more risks as a director than just about any other currently working in Hollywood. He brings difficult stories to a popular audience that would otherwise never be told.
So I was perplexed twitter was filled with ultra-conservative Tea Party wing-nuts saying American Sniper made them want to “go to war and shoot Arabs,” and hyperventilating progressives calling it “jingoistic, pro-war propaganda.”
As with everything, you should never trust social media for film reviews. Or anything, for that matter.
American Sniper is not Eastwood’s best film. But nor is it an advertisement for the glory of war. It fits into a consistent theme Clint Eastwood has focussed on as director: the dehumanising impact of violence.
The American Sniper, Chris Kyle, was a conservative, rural poor Texan thrust into semi-celebrity through his prowess as a sniper. Chris Kyle was a real-life soldier who became the ‘deadliest sniper in US military history,’ racking up 160 official kills on the battlefield.
In the movie, Chris Kyle thinks his cause is just. He believes Iraq has something to do with 9/11, and that the war there is necessary to halt terrorist violence back home.
Clint Eastwood was personally against the war in Iraq, but has the artistic integrity to make a film from the point of view of an individual who thought it was justified. Eastwood tries to balance the narrow views of Chris Kyle against the reality he steadfastly refuses to recognise – the brutality and injustice of the Iraq invasion, and the devastating psychological impact on those that waged it.
Eastwood assumes the audience is intelligent enough to understand the point he is making, and scatters contrary views to that of Kyle’s throughout the movie. This includes a scene where the grieving mother of a dead soldier reads out a letter from him – sent two weeks before he died – at his funeral.
The letter says of the war, in part: “When does glory fade away and become an unjustified crusade?”
Afterwards, Chris Kyle’s wife, Taya (Sienna Miller) asks him what he thinks about the letter. His answer is abrupt: “that letter killed Mark.”
The letter killed his friend. Not Iraq, not an illegal war, not an insurgent fighting against an external aggressor: but a lack of faith in the military project. This is one scene among many that reveals the constant, self-destructive, state of denial of Chris Kyle. A denial of both the purpose of the American mission and the impact the war is having on his sanity.
The movie is not without its flaws. We never see Kyle making a mistake: we never see him shooting someone and finding out later that it was an innocent civilian. Given the body count attributed to him over four tours, it is reasonable to assume he made errors in the fog of war. While we see glimpses of the tragic loss of life for Iraqi civilians caught between the American war machine and a vicious Iraqi counterinsurgency, they are only the briefest of glimpses.
Coming from the director of Letters from Iwo Jima – possibly the only film ever made (by an American) that shows World War II from the Japanese perspective – this is omission is a disappointment.
But the plight of Iraqi civilians is not the purpose of the film. They are at the periphery of American Sniper because they are at the periphery of Chris Kyle’s narrow world-view.
American Sniper is about the cost of war on the individuals that fight it. It is pro-soldier, without being pro-war. It is about the the impact it has on Chris Kyle, his friends on the battlefield, and the veterans he meets at home. The film distinguishes between the venal ideology of powerful politicians, and the genuine belief of many service men and women that the cause is a just one (initially, anyway).
Bradley Cooper gives a convincing performance of a man disintegrating psychologically under the violence he has witnessed and committed. The movie shows the men around Kyle increasingly doubting their mission in Iraq, and uses real-life veterans to document the tragic after-image of war: the lost limbs, the post-traumatic stress disorder, and the difficulty in returning to ‘real’ life back home.
In this way the film is not a simple biopic of one man, but a nuanced character study of the damage war does to the American foot soldier.
American Sniper is, according to some, a political ‘Rorschach’ test, whereby how you respond to the film reveals your political inclination. Well, I’m a left-winger who protested against the war in Iraq. I can tell you that American Sniper isn’t a personal philosophy test, it’s a stupidity test. If you think that American Sniper is either a call to shoot Arabs, or jingoistic propaganda, then you’re stupid. Thankfully, Clint Eastwood doesn’t make films for stupid people; he makes movies for people capable of mature, independent thought.
As with most things on social media and in life, the worst are full of passionate intensity. Ignore them. Watch the film and make up your own mind.
Rating: 3.5 stars (out of five)
Bechdel test: Fail