Sunday Review: American Sniper

Not in Eastwood’s cross-hairs – but still disappointed

By Bob Boldt

As for American Sniper (2014, directed by Clint Eastwood), if Clint was out to direct a propaganda film, he did a pretty hopeless job of it. There was little to recommend it even to the Tea Bag nation. He could learn a lot from ZD-30’s Kathryn Bigelow. Now, there is a true embodiment of a latter-day Leni Riefenstahl.

The real Chris Kyle

    The simple Redneck, quasi-Biblical homilies delivered by Kyle’s father around the dinner table, which set the premise of the movie, were not even worthy of a B movie of the morally black & white World War II era. Our hero is portrayed as an emotionally shut down, two-dimensional cut-out character with little evidence of any real psychological complexity or moral nuance. Eastwood does make a pro-forma stab at showing the conflict he undergoes in deciding to kill a grenade carrying 9-year-old Iraqi boy and his teenage sister. The one-two punch of an inept director and a talentless actor delivered a dramatic flatness to even the harrowing battle scenes.

    I do give props to Kyle’s wife, actress Elise Robertson, who is the only character who manfully (ha ha) tries to demonstrate a modicum of emotional range.
    Perhaps the director’s most sympathetic attempt for me was the hero’s inevitable PTSD and the monumentally under-acted shots of Kyle’s relating to other fucked-up vets on the shooting range. Again there is no attempt to really describe the complex emotional lives of psychologically and physically disabled men attempting to overcome the impact of war on their psyches. Of course, all the seemingly endless combat situations that Clint stole from war-gaming videos were shot and directed entirely from the point of view of our storm troopers.

    Somewhere along the way the director lost track of the history of who were the real villains in the events he was describing. Almost no Iraqi is shown in a sympathetic light. Of course, that is almost exactly the way our troops are encouraged to see oppressed populations.
    That said, it seemed Eastwood was out to deliberately avoid any semblance of nuance, dramatic conflict, or an examination of the personal, interior, emotional landscape of his characters. There were so many punches pulled in this movie, I felt really betrayed. Frankly, I would much more have appreciated the really well-crafted propaganda piece that I anticipated. All I got was a boring, bland, artless movie, directed by a man who knows more about the surface of a moon of Jupiter than he does about the contents of the human mind and soul.
    I’m not a big fan of Eastwood. Amerikan Sniper [not a typo] did little to enhance his reputation.

Copyright © 2015 by Bob Boldt