Center Mass?

Rating: 5/10 (4 August 2015)

It's a gripping movie about a sniper in the Navy Seals who serves four tours in the Middle East and then is killed at home by a veteran he was trying to help. The scenes of action are well done, positively spooky, especially a fire fight in the middle of a sandstorm, where no one knows where anyone else is, or, if they see a figure, whether it's friend or foe. And it's informative. It never occurred to me that in the middle of a battle you could make a phone call to your home between bullets.
But I was confused as to the movie's intent. If we take the story at face value, it's almost a cartoon. Very polite Texan boy learns to shoot on the prairie, then becomes a sniper after watching 9/11 on the television. "Those men are my enemies." "I have to defend my country." Are we to take that literally? Some of it sounds like a World War II comic book, the kind of remember so well. Not that Bradley Cooper as Chris Kyle has much to say. He's a bulky man with an ordinary face who says "Yes, sir" and "No, sir." He swears little.
And his career takes him to the Middle East where he becomes a hero. The shooting of an armed woman and an armed young boy doesn't bother him, nor does it bother the viewer for more than a second, nor is it shown in a way that should bother anyone.
The fire fights are vivid and there is no question of Kyle's bravery. But then neither do we get much of Kyle's character beyond what little the film is prepared to tell us. Only once, does his tension break through that composed surface, when he almost kills a dog that is playfully wrestling with someone at a picnic.
There is his wife and child at home, of course. He clearly cares deeply for them. Sienna Miller doesn't have much to do except unfurl the stereotyped role of the wife who wants her husband at home, not risking his life overseas. John Wayne's wives and girl friends always had the same complaint.
Kyle's character is capable of making the kinds of harmless insults and jokes that abound in companies of men. He jokes about his wounded brother's having a two-inch penis. And he smiles. But then he always smiles except when there is no expression on his face at all. He's sincere throughout and dies ironically and, nicely, off screen in an epilogue.
The movie leaps ahead and skips lightly over his SEAL training and all the rest of his initial adjustment to the military. And there are other gaps. We don't see him become the Number One SEAL sniper, a hero. We're told that he's such. The morality of the Iraq invasion is never brought up. That glimpse of 9/11 was enough. "Blackhawk Down" never questioned our presence in Mogadishu, but was a far better film.
I had a hard time making heads or tails out of his military career, his family life, or anything else about him, except that he's sincere, selfless, and motivated by patriotism. That's not telling very much about what's going on inside his head. And, not being the sort of man given to introspection, there may in fact not be much else.
For whatever reason, he appears to have exaggerated his decorations. He claims two Silver Stars and five Bronze Stars with valor. More detailed records from Kyle's personnel file only reflect one Silver Star and three Bronze stars instead of the five he wrote about.
As I said, I found it a confusing film into which almost anything can be read -- or it can be taken as the simple, integumental story that we see, without thinking about it.
I find it more difficult to grasp what Clint Eastwood is getting at as he grows older. His early films were mostly junk about comic chimpanzees and uninteresting cowboy figures. But then he directed "Unforgiven," which raised a multitude of challenging questions.
"American Sniper" poses a question too: What is "American Sniper"?