Stop Sniping At ​“Sniper”

I came close to not seeing American Sniper, the controversial film about America’s most prolific sniper, Chris Kyle. Having now seen the film, I blame the liberal press for making me feel guilty that the film lacked context about how we got into the ill-fated war in Iraq and therefore implicitly endorsed it. I blame conservative pundits for making me feel guilty about wanting to see a film about such a cold-blooded way of killing.

That critical sniping is all totally misguided, in my humble opinion.

In the run-up to the Oscars, the film, directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Bradley Cooper, is playing everywhere, from our commercial cinemas to the downtown Criterion to the beloved time-warpy Cinema 1,2,3,4 overlooking Middletown Avenue.

The film is neither of the left nor of the right. It commits few sins of talkiness in either direction. If we get through the next decades, American Sniper should be required viewing about the war in Iraq, just as Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried captured the essence of the Vietnam experience.

Cooper (pictured at the top of the story), who put on 40 pounds of muscle for the role, fully inhabits Kyle, the young Texas rodeo rider who after 9/11 served four tours of duty in Iraq and morphed into a legend, a benevolent protector, stretched out on the rooftop with his 1,000-yard rifle as Marine patrols broke down doors in Fallujah and Ramadi (to Iraqi militants, on the other hand, he was a wanted man with a big price on his head). Under Eastwood’s direction, Kyle becomes larger than life. In close up and medium distance shots, Cooper is bigger, taller, tougher than anyone else. He seems always to fill the frame, as he grabs the terrifying tools of his trade, clamps in the lethal magazines, and pulls on his sunglasses before humping out, like Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Terminator movies.

In the film’s most gripping moments — when Kyle must decide to pull the trigger on a woman carrying a bomb and does, and then does again on her kid, who picks up the weapon and advances on the Marines Kyle is tasked to protect — the film achieves a kind of elevation. The man holding the rifle, setting the sights, taking the wind and distance measurements, is a personification of our country: a big, decent, rodeo-riding America tearing itself apart with impossible Solomonic decisions.

In short, the movie is a true tragedy.

In ways the film reminded me of another Cooper — Gary — in his equally astonishing role as the eponymous sergeant in Sergeant York, the Christian pacifist farm boy from Tennessee who evolves into a sharpshooter in World War I and picks off dozens of Germans. In that great Howard Hawks film, York’s superiors ask him why he did it, given the pacifism he espoused. York says in effect that the Germans were killing his friends and he couldn’t allow that to happen without taking action. It’s that simple.

A version of the same answer emerges two-thirds of the way through American Sniper, when Kyle is struggling to readjust to normal life after four tours. His psychiatrist opens his folder and says Kyle is credited with 160 kills. Does any of that bother him? ​“No sir,” Kyle replies. He’ll answer to God in the affirmative for each of those kills. It’s all the guys he could not protect and save that bother him.

Finding ways to help vets without arms and legs — through teaching them how to shoot — becomes Kyle’s personal route out of PTSD, and also the occasion of his and the film’s end. By the time he’s killed on a shooting range in 2013, Kyle has returned to being just a man.

There’s nothing tragic in the Aristotelian sense about his end, though it is bitterly ironic, that in helping a vet to overcome his problems through shooting, he gets shot. But I left the film not with this private tragedy, but the larger one, the Greek tragedy we all learned about in school: the story about the character with great force for good riven by a flaw inseparable from the greatness. I was left with the face of Kyle, Cooper, America, seeing his buddies, young soldiers, on a narrow street full of potential innocents, staring through the telescope mounted on his rifle, and agonizing about what to do.