American Sniper

American Sniper

“American Sniper” is the latest from Clint Eastwood, following “Jersey Boys” (which only came out about half a year ago) with what some might call unseemly haste. But it proves the old axiom “never count an auteur out” by being his best directorial effort since 2009′s under seen “Invictus” and that’s pretty much right off the bat. The movie starts with Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper), on his first tour of Iraq as a Navy SEAL sniper, trying to decide whether to shoot a little boy who’s running at an American convoy with a grenade. He shoots.

What he does next and how we come to understand the terrible weight of responsibility he feels for those actions is what this story is all about, and Hall tells it with almost ruthless efficiency. After that prologue there’s not much more than Bradley in a few different places Iraq, where he kills people; San Diego, where he trains people how to kill other people; Texas, where his wife (Miller) waits for him while he’s killing and teaching people rarely out of his navy whites, generally wearing a ball cap so low it covers most of his eyes.

This is Eastwood’s best picture since “Unforgiven,” but it bears noting that “Unforgiven” bore down harder on its audience than any movie I’ve ever seen—a grinding forcefulness I found thrilling as well as revolting.

Of course, this was true of them in real life too: he is the all-time deadliest sniper in U.S. Navy history, with 160 confirmed kills. Eastwood’s treatment of different battle scenarios including one in which Kyle has to take out a woman and child is characteristically undecorated for the filmmaker. Grim, purposeful, austere; violence as part of American history and character is one of Eastwood’s great themes as a film actor and director, but he has never been an overly analytical or intellectualizing storyteller, which turns out to be this movie’s greatest strength.

It has no opinion about whether the war in Iraq was a good or bad idea; it simply IS, and Kyle is in it, and he’s also a husband and father. But more than that: He believes deeply in what he’s doing over there, so much so that his fervency infects his relationships back home in ways that can’t help but unsettle even him. After another soldier dies on a raid that leaves half Kyle’s crew dead along with the men they were trying to kill (the structure of some of these scenes recall “The Hurt Locker”), Kyle returns to the United States for the funeral.

At the graveside service, a relative reads aloud from one of the fallen soldier’s last letters home expressing doubt and disappointment about what he saw over there; on the car ride back she asks him if it was true; looking straight ahead he says yes; she starts crying again: “What am I supposed to say?” (What are we?) The role could have easily been another stock Complaining Military Wife (and Miller does get some choice moments yelling at her offscreen husband on satellite phone), but she seems smarter than that here.

She knows that these very qualities his rigid loyalty and sharp focus, his determination to see things through once he commits himself are what make him good at his job. Even a warrior as devoted as Kyle can’t help but be fucked up by this mission though. And the more accomplished he gets, and the more rep the sniper gets, and the messier his accomplishments become, etc., until you’re more scared of him than anything else in the movie by the time he comes home from Iraq. But not Taya.

The whole thing ends on such an unresolved note that Eastwood feels compelled to provide a real-life coda: they didn’t mention it at all in “Casino Royale,” but after spending ten years as an assassin for some very bad people, Bond is told to go to hell by M (Judi Dench) so he does; fuck it. It’s what she’d been begging him to do all along anyway [breaks fourth wall]! I jest because I’m still so angry with her over “Quantum of Solace.”

Anyway, Bradley Cooper gives one of his best performances ever here. Cooper has always struck me as a fairly dangerous guy; even when he’s playing nice guys there’s something about his lack of self-doubt that reads like sociopathy but not here. Here, his natural edginess is put to good use; this guy doesn’t feel like a safe person to be around or with but never mind that now.

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