A Moving Portrait of a Modern Warrior

Rating: 9/10 (17 January 2015)

They called him Legend. Well before he had completed his fourth tour in Iraq or broken the record for confirmed kills, Chris Kyle's fellow soldiers regarded him as a hero, an almost superhuman figure. People joked that he was invincible, that he could win any fight, and some of them were only half joking. But of course he was not. He was not invincible, nor was he immune to the effects of the war raging around him. He was a warrior, but he was still a man. And Clint Eastwood's American Sniper is the story of the man behind the legend.
Given the things he did, the most extraordinary thing about the man at the center of this story is how ordinary he is. Chris Kyle started out as just a small town Texas ranch hand, dreaming of becoming a rodeo cowboy till he saw our embassies burning on TV. Even after becoming a SEAL, he doesn't carry himself with the same bravado one would expect. In fact he's not the type to be particularly talkative about anything, remaining shy and soft spoken in social situations. His romantic advances towards his girlfriend-turned-wife are almost endearingly cheesy, making up with earnestness what he lacks in romantic sophistication. He's really just a down to earth American good old boy- who happens to be a model soldier and phenomenal with a gun.
Bradley Cooper absolutely nails this role in a performance defined by understatement. He blends so seamlessly into the role that you almost forget that he's an actor playing a character. He's able to say so much with so few words, his tone saying as much as the words themselves and his expressions saying the things his character cannot speak out loud. We sense his anger, frustration, exhilaration and at times even fear without the need for drawn out exposition. If you blink you may miss it, but Cooper and Eastwood have perfected the less is more school of characterization.
Under Eastwood's direction, the scenes in this film come mostly in two flavors: tense and intense. The intensity comes with the firefights spread throughout the movie. These are expertly shot, suspenseful, as realistic as Hollywood can produce, and always important to the story. None of the action is gratuitous or included for its own sake, and what actually happened takes precedence over what would be the most fun or exciting, or the least disturbing. And in between the action the tension is always there, slowly building, because he can't know when the next firefight will be. Anytime on patrol someone close to him could be hit by an enemy sniper's bullet without warning.
Even when he's home, he really isn't. The tension is still there and his mind is still in the war. He can't relax, can't relate to anyone in civilian life. And so again and again he goes back to the fighting. There's talk of glory and at what point it ceases to have value, but that's not why he's fighting Neither, as he claims, is he fighting to protect his wife and children. They're safe half a world away. No, he keeps fighting because he feels obligated to his brothers. He knows that every minute he's home there's still a war going on, and he's scared to death that good people will die if he's not there to protect them.
And on another level it's very personal for him. He can't come back from the war, really come back, because he has too much unfinished business. There are friends to avenge, targets left over from his last tour. Targets like Mustafa. Kyle hears of him early on his first tour; an especially deadly Al-Oueda sniper rumored to have been an Olympian. Soon he sees firsthand just how much substance the rumors have in the first of many, many encounters. Across all four tours they meet again and again, seeing each other only through their scopes, coming so close to killing the other. It's like Mustafa is the white whale to his captain Ahab. Kyle simply can't rest knowing he's still out there.
But every war must end, every warrior must come home, and at long last he does. Finally he reaches the point where the strain is too much and combat no longer holds any lure, and so he leaves the war for good. Leaving it behind him however is not so easy. Readjusting is as hard as anything he's done. Admitting to himself, much less others that everything isn't "fine" is almost impossible. But he does. In helping others who are like himself he finds his peace, some would even say redemption. And it is this, more than anything he did in Iraq that the film treats as his greatest triumph.
And that is also the greatest tragedy. It was after he had come home, not only physically but mentally; when he had truly become Chris Kyle, father and husband, and begun living what should have been his happily ever after, that he died. Everyone watching already knows how the story ends, but that doesn't make it any less painful when it does. Handled in the same direct, understated manner as the rest of the film, his funeral procession makes for one of the most poignant and melancholy endings in recent memory.
American Sniper is not a perfect film. It's not quite a Hurt Locker or Zero Dark Thirty. The establishing flashbacks at the beginning come too quickly, and some later parts go too slow. Nor do any of his fellow soldiers make more than a fleeting impression. But that is understandable, because this is Kyle's story, and it is a very good one. Well shot and directed, exceptionally acted, and subtle in its depth, American Sniper is a good war movie and an excellent biography. In a winter with many excellent films in theaters, this is one of the best.