Film Review: American Sniper

Watching American Sniper as a British viewer, someone whose idea of patriotism is watching England fail to win the World Cup every four years, can be an uncomfortable experience. Every awkwardly patriotic diatribe uttered by Bradley Cooper's Chris Kyle (and I counted at least three) is made extremely po-faced and with not a hint of humour. Is director Clint Eastwood condoning or condemning such unthinking nationalistic pride? Is Chris Kyle here portrayed as a naive but well-meaning patriot or is he a foolish gung-ho nationalist?

This lack of clarity as to the central theme of the movie is infused into its very structure. The film is centred around Kyle's four tours of duty, each one involving exciting action sequences and tense encounters. At the end of each tour Kyle returns home and is plainly suffering from PTSD, struggling to communicate this to his wife as he has been raised in an environment which does not allow displays of masculine emotion. He is emotionally repressed, and oppressed by patriarchal strictures about how men should behave. These are the most fascinating and most successful elements of the film, and Cooper does an admirable job in the role, communicating in a quiet, grunty Texan drawl. However, each time the movie begins to explore Kyle’s troubled psyche, it drags us back to the tedious Iraq-set action sequences and makes us watch Kyle and his fellow US soldiers revel in killing “savages”, as they are referred to frequently throughout the movie. This formulaic structure not only confuses the message of the film, but it also slows pacing down to a crawl as the predictability of the narrative becomes clear to the viewer.

Rather than focus on Kyle’s psychological torment and troubling relationship with war, the film creates a couple of frankly preposterous and largely fictional villains for him to fight -  the sniper Mustafa (a Syrian Olympian inexplicably fighting in the Iraqi insurgency) and the dreaded "Butcher", a silly horror movie reject who rips off limbs with an electric drill. This could have been an interesting way to create a dark reflection of Kyle’s life and therefore create a clearer picture of his psyche and motivations. But Eastwood and screenwriter Jason Hall don’t bring any such nuance to the story. The reason for these creations is far simpler; without them, Kyle's adventures in the Middle East would seem pointless and futile. By creating Kyle’s nemeses Eastwood is able to show Kyle as a true hero and give him a reason to keep fighting. Take them out of the picture, and he is just like any other soldier, futilely fighting and dying on the sands of Fallujah.
 

American Sniper is plainly trying to be more than just a war movie - it wants to give us some insight into a man who dedicated his life to fighting overseas for his country. But by propagating an overly simplistic portrayal of war as both necessary and exciting, as well as feeding into existing narratives of “good vs evil” or “us vs them”, it tells us very little. Nothing is resolved or learned by the end of the film, and Kyle’s tragic murder at the hands of a PTSD-suffering veteran he was trying to help is glossed over with a simple on-screen intertitle. Frankly, he deserved better.