Direction!! Acting!! American Sniper!!

Rating: 7/10 (6 March 2015)

BY STEPHEN MARCHE
American Sniper, Clint Eastwood's Iraq War film starring Bradley Cooper, opened last weekend to a small measure of controversy and an epic public response. The movie made an estimated $105.3 million over the long holiday weekend, an absurd sum for an R-rated war drama devoid of superheroes. It broke two January box-office records previously held by Avatar—by Avatar, for the love of God— and it has already surpassed almost every Clint Eastwood movie's lifetime gross in a few days. (Unforgiven made $101 million over its entire run.) Most remarkable of all is that American Sniper deserves all its success. It is the first great film made about the war in Iraq. (It follows sniper Chris Kyle's tours in Iraq, which included the Second Battle of Fallujah.)
The controversies surrounding American Sniper are predictable, although still quite silly. Michael Moore made the claim that snipers are cowards, and then seemed struck that anyone was offended by the remark. A bizarre statement, truly. You can accuse Navy SEALs of a great deal, but cowardice is not on the slate. Others have more seriously taken issue with the way the film represents history. To which I can only say that going to a Hollywood movie for a history lesson is like going to a brothel for a lecture in philosophy. You're in the wrong place.
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A MICHAEL KEATON STORY HE WOULD RATHER YOU DIDN'T... No one is denying the quality of the film, well, with the exception of those fake babies. That would be nearly impossible. What makes some critics uncomfortable is their perception of the film's celebration of violence. Chris Kyle, whose autobiography provided the basis of the film, was the deadliest sniper in U.S. military history. He was a naturally gifted shooter from boyhood, and his gift was nurtured by dedicated training until his deployment to Iraq, where urban warfare provided the perfect venue for its expression.
Eastwood does not shy away from displaying Kyle's incredible skills with a rifle, it is true. But to say that American Sniper is pro-war or even a simply heroic portrait of Chris Kyle is deliberately to misinterpret it. At the beginning of the story, we see Kyle as a child in Texas. His father instructs him in a simple code: There are wolves and there are sheep and there are sheepdogs in this world. And he is to use his violence to be a sheepdog rather than a wolf. In the broadest terms, the story of American Sniper is that of a man given this incredibly crude ethical system, thrust into the morass of the Iraq War, and watching it crumble.
During his first tour, Kyle is forced to decide whether to shoot a young boy as he runs toward a convoy of soldiers with what appears to be a grenade. As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan progress, as the tours add up, the decisions become even more complex and the purpose of the violence less clear. Kyle's sign is a crusader's cross. He displays a skull very similar to that of the Punisher comic-book character on the side of his Humvee. He wants to make war on "the evil" of "the savages." He takes missions out of a spirit of personal revenge. His counterpart, his foremost enemy, is a sniper named Mustafa who takes videos of his kills and sells them on the street. But at least when Mustafa goes to kill, he's in the same country as his babies. "God, country, family" is Kyle's motto. It's also the motto of "the savages."