“American Sniper,” Clint Eastwood’s military drama starring Bradley Cooper as Navy SEAL and Iraq war sharpshooter Chris Kyle, solidified its standing as this season’s biggest surprise hit — and perhaps the biggest war movie of all time —when its box office earnings surged past $200 million. The film, which is nominated for six Oscars, including best actor and best picture, has also become a bona fide cultural phenomenon, inspiring a slew of commentaries and social media sub-arguments that occasionally confound expectations.
There’s no doubt that “American Sniper” is a big hit with the red-state constituencies from which Kyle and many of his fellow service members hail. But the movie — a well-acted, absorbing portrait of Kyle in action during the Iraq war and coping with trauma and dislocation when he returns home — has been a hit with viewers of all philosophical stripes.
At a Producers Guild Awards event, Eastwood insisted that, rather than glorifying combat, “American Sniper” is actually anti-war, in that it portrays “what (war) does to the family and the people who have to go back into civilian life like Chris Kyle did.” Comedian Bill Maher slammed the film and its protagonist, declaring Kyle “a psychopath patriot, and [Americans] love him.”
That “American Sniper” has been greeted with such different interpretations attests to a movie that never hews to obvious ideological lines. But the wildly divergent readings are also typical of an emerging genre of war film that “American Sniper” exemplifies, one that strikes a different focus and tone than its predecessors.
Portrayal of pros
“American Sniper” joins a slew of wartime professional procedurals that take similar positions toward their protagonists, from 2013’s “Lone Survivor” to last year’s “Fort Bliss,” about an Army medic and single mother returning home after a tour in Afghanistan. The filmmakers who have perfected the genre most successfully are director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal, whose superb wartime thrillers “The Hurt Locker” and “Zero Dark Thirty,” respectively, best express the new sensibility: Their main characters aren’t cowboys or ill-fated cannon fodder but skillful, serious-minded operators who are focused on the duty at hand. The tone is sympathetic but not hagiographic, appreciative but not uncritically awestruck; instead Bigelow and Boal treat their protagonists with even-handed frankness — which goes a long way in explaining why “Zero Dark Thirty” became a big hit in 2012, despite being targeted for a takedown by opportunistic politicians who mistook its representation of torture for endorsement.
The same kind of controversy has been brewing around “American Sniper,” with some viewers seeing it as a blinkered glorification of an unjust war and others admiring how Eastwood and screenwriter Jason Hall portray the psychic toll the Iraq conflict took on Kyle. (Still others object that Kyle, who called Iraqis “savages” in his book and boasted of picking off looters from the Superdome rooftop during Katrina, wasn’t nearly the paragon of rectitude the filmmakers portray him as.) Although Kyle supports the Iraq war, some of his colleagues pointedly do not.
Defies reductivism
The fact that no one knows quite how to take “American Sniper” — that it can’t be reductively labeled as a polemic — is typical of a genre that often lands like a square peg in the round hole of our hyper-partisan political discourse. Rather than an avatar of noble American exceptionalism or a symbol of a grievously misguided foreign doctrine, Kyle is portrayed as a highly trained, surpassingly competent operator whose comfort with firearms and self-image as a protector dovetails perfectly with his chosen career path. Eastwood, Hall and Cooper are careful never to put a heavy spin on Kyle as a hero, victim or villain. The result is that viewers are embracing and abhorring the film for the same reason: They’re conflating respect with valorization.
In a post-draft era of a voluntary armed force, the familiar tropes of World War II and Vietnam movies no longer hold.
In many ways, the myriad interpretations of “American Sniper” reflect a conflict from which most Americans were disconnected and remain unresolved, and an asymmetrical global context that is deeply unsettling and confusing. With consensus still stubbornly elusive, we reflexively look for heroes, but they’re no longer martyred draftees, morally damaged warmongers or shining warrior-gods. They’re just ordinary people, doing jobs that are anything but.
