Chris Kyle was the deadliest sniper in US military history, responsible for 160 confirmed kills during four tours of duty. Insurgents in Iraq called him the Devil of Ramadi, a monster in the shadows to be hated and feared. Comrades and supporters saw him as an American Hercules, a talismanic presence in the “war on terror”.
Clint Eastwood stands squarely in the second camp. His gripping, incurious film gives the impression of having not so much been directed as dictated. It stares so fixedly down the rifle sight that it is finally guilty of tunnel vision.
Is it possible to relish a drama but resent the way that it’s told? American Sniper (adapted from Kyle’s autobiography) offers a heartfelt salute to US muscle, a Green Berets for the war in Iraq; ringing with patriotic fervour and bullish male bonding. It’s lean, tough and tightly paced, darting from the rooftops of Falluja down through the ruined streets where the yellow dust swirls. But the film leaves a mass of casualties on either side of the frame.
Bradley Cooper plays Kyle, a reformed tearaway, incensed by 9/11 and determined to defend “the greatest country on Earth”. He’s as broad as a barn and as clear-sighted as an eagle. He deals death from a distance and he makes the town safe for his men. Time and again Kyle heads back into the inferno, chasing a Syrian marksman (Sammy Sheik) who may just be his equal. Time and again he comes home with his blood pressure through the roof. His wife (Sienna Miller) has had enough of him; she’s contemplating divorce. So he sits in the garden with a thousand-yard stare. He is staring at the barbecue and seeing Iraq.
All of which is engrossing, so far as it goes. It’s just that American Sniper is so conditioned by its first-person shooter aesthetic that it never widens its focus or pans left or right. Kyle’s wife is left hanging, while the war on Iraq is a just, noble cause. Meanwhile the Iraqis are reduced to a band of shadowy savages, darting like phantoms through the alleyways and led by a terrorist Satan who likes killing small boys with a drill. No doubt this sensibility reflects Kyle’s experience and if so, that’s fine. But I couldn’t help feeling that the film rather risks letting its man off the hook. In failing to interrogate the raw matter of Kyle’s book, it simply decides to print the legend instead.
In one early scene, Kyle’s father tells him that the world is divided into three types: sheep, wolves and sheepdogs. Kyle sees himself as a sheepdog, a noble protector of the weak and the innocent, and it is clear that Eastwood does too. But is the world that simple? A different film (a better film) might have asked the wolves what they think, or at least wondered why the sheep behave as they do.
American Sniper has no interest in that. The sole concession it makes is to acknowledge that the dog is sometimes traumatised by its heroic job of fending off wolves. This means it is therefore all the more deserving of a pat on the head, or a Silver Star medal, or a marble statue in its honour. In the absence of a monument, American Sniper does the job just as well.
