Heroic army sniper traumatized by war

Rating: 8/10 (22 January 2015)

The debate over whether Clint Eastwood's American Sniper is pro- or anti-war seems to miss the point. When civilization is threatened by Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and especially ISIS that question does not arise the way it did over Iraq, Vietnam, Korea, and back to WW I. After 9/11 America unavoidably felt under attack and could not simply turn the other cheek or two. Eastwood's point is rather the cost of the individual soldier's duty in war, not whether it is currently necessary.
The film gives no sense of what cause the enemy may be promoting. The 9/11 attack and the subsequent guerrilla warfare are presented simply as a murderous threat to America, pitting lethal civilians, women and children against the US forces. After killing one child, Kyle is relieved not to have to kill another, who drops his rocket launcher in time.
Even as the film traces Chris Kyle's growth into The Legend, America's all-time greatest sniper, it limns his hardening as a human being and the war's traumatic effect on his psyche. While his kids play, in front of a blank TV screen he hears a war movie going on in his head. He erupts at a playful family dog and when his infant daughter isn't treated fast enough in the hospital. The sniper hero returns a time bomb. When he reluctantly visits the crippled vets their shattered limbs and prosthetics are emblems of his psychological damage. Though he manages to pull himself back into norrmalcy his murder by another troubled American veteran leaves Kyle still the example of the war's damage to its heroes—and by implication the country's failure adequately to provide for them.
The opening shot is the classic war movie shot of an invincible tank crushing everything under its cogs: the war machine. Kyle's story reminds us that wars are fought and won and suffered not by machines but people. The Legend is also a man, whose war doesn't end when he gets home, whose wounds and even crippling aren't necessarily physical.
The epilogue shows how closely the film's central couple resemble the originals and focuses on another war machine: the funeral cortege and Kyle's real memorial in the Dallas football stadium. The imagery cuts two ways. It celebrates American patriotism and its hero. But the brightness and rah rah spirit ring hollow against the suffering we've seen the vets carry.
The film works in a couple of old traditions. The collation of deer hunting and war recalls the metaphor for the loss of innocence at the heart of Michael Cimino's 1978 Vietnam classic The Deer Hunter, as well as Norman Mailer's 1967 hunting novella Why Are We In Vietnam? Here Kyle's first kill — of a child and his mother — is paused for a flashback to his first kill as a hunter, shooting a deer with his father. Both are examples of his "losing his cherry." He repeats the cycle by taking his son hunting between tours of duty. As the country boy who goes off to war as a champion shot he also recalls Gary Cooper's Sergeant York (1941), a similar biopic without the psychological investigation and graphic suffering. Moving from the latter Howard Hawks film to this is like moving from Blake's Songs of Innocence to Experience.
The film's first key scene is the family dinner discussion where Kyle's father divides people into three: sheep, wolves and sheepdogs. "We protect our own," he insists, warning his sons not to be either the sheep or the wolf, the victim or the predator, but to act as protector. As he hides his emotions, the traumatized Kyle insists he feels less guilt about the people he killed than about the comrades he failed to protect. In his last encounter with his shell-shocked and disillusioned kid brother, we see how rare the successful protector is.
In the key later scene Kyle imperils his comrades by taking the long-shot to kill his enemy sharpshooter Moustapha. There his vanity may get the better of him. To confirm his own Legend against his rival perhaps here he shifts from sheepdog to wolf. Avenging his fallen comrade Biggles and knowing that Moustapha had US soldiers in his gunsight may not adequately justify the carnage that Kyle's brilliant and successful shot caused. That's the point where he realizes he's ready to go home. In war even more than in peace the hero has to know when to quit.