Chris Kyle: Not A Hero Or A Cold-Blooded Killer, But A Man Doing What He Believed Was The Right Thing

Rating: 9/10 (20 February 2015)

Iraq is a war that, like Vietnam, will continue to divide America for decades and generations to come; and any film that has ever focused in on any aspect of that war is bound to be controversial. So it is with American SNIPER, the 2014 war film from legendary producer/director (and former actor) Clint Eastwood that is based on the memoir of perhaps the most lethal sniper in the history of the wars that America has undertaken, Chris Kyle. Pundits from the Left and Right have had a lot of things to say about the film; but a very careful and clinical look at the film will find out that many of the rantings from each side about it are not necessarily accurate.
Bradley Cooper has the very tough job of portraying the life that Kyle, a Texas native, had growing up, and how the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa influenced his decision to join the elite Navy Seals. It is 9/11 that inevitably sends him into a trajectory towards Iraq, where he served four punishing tours of duty and became a "legend" (to his fellow soldiers there) for his accuracy at hitting "the bad guys." But as tough as Kyle was, he pretty soon got tired of being referred to as "Legend"; and, given the gradual emotional distance between him and his wife (Sienna Miller), he, like hundreds of thousands of veterans before him, began to suffer from PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder). Once he got back home after the fourth tour, during which he engaged in a firefight with an Iraqi militia leader who actually had a $180,000 bounty on his own head, he came back to do his part for veterans who suffered not only from PTSD, but the more obvious physical injuries that war often inflicts on the people who fight them as well. Unfortunately, on February 2, 2013, one of those veterans did what no Iraqi or Al-Qaeda militia fighter could to Kyle, which was to kill him. At the end of American SNIPER, Eastwood utilizes actual TV video footage of the massive funeral procession given to Kyle in his home state of Texas.
Cooper doesn't have the easiest job in the world of accurately portraying Kyle, whose attitude toward all Iraqis in his memoir was that they were all "savages", but he succeeds at this toughest of tasks quite well. For the moment, though, it is, inevitably, that "savages" part of the memoir, which is slightly tampered down by Eastwood in the film, which is the most fiercely debated and spun aspect of the piece. I personally feel, having seen the film, that both the Left and the Right have gotten American SNIPER wrong in a number of ways. The mistaken criticism of the film by liberals is that Kyle was a product of American warmongers like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and was "made" into a killer, when those same liberals have to share some of the blame for allowing the Iraq war to go forward for fear of being branded "unpatriotic" and "supporting terrorism." The more egregious championing of American SNIPER by those on the Far Right, especially wing nuts like Sarah Palin, is that Kyle should somehow be "celebrated" as a hero for being trained into becoming the best "killer" the U.S. military ever had, which unfortunately is a terribly dishonest distortion of what war really does, for those who must fight it (like Kyle) and those caught in the middle, both on a physical and on a psychological level. Kyle is not a man who should be either lionized or demonized, but should, like every man and woman who served, be given their due for doing what he believed was right, however much we may have bitterly disagreed with that war.
The perception of Eastwood as a right-wing ideologue, which is not the whole picture, obscures the fact that both he and Cooper are even-handed in portraying Kyle, and what our men and women saw in Iraq. It would be enormously misleading to think that this film supports either that war or what Kyle did, because, for one, it doesn't; and for another, it does show what repetitious battle can do to the human psyche, even to one like Chris Kyle. That is how I hope, in the not-too-distant future, American SNIPER can eventually be seen, and not from too many politically distorted angles.