Caught in the crosshairs

Even in his mid-eighties, Clint Eastwood continues to make riveting dramas that explore the human condition and the complicated nature of relationships and how difficult choices can affect the bonds between human beings. Case in point: "American Sniper," Eastwood's highest grossing film to date. Here's a roundup of salient points made about this film during our recent CineVerse discussion:

OTHER FILMS DIRECTED BY CLINT EASTWOOD

• Unforgiven

• Gran Torino

• Bird

• The Bridges of Madison County

• Flags of Our Fathers

• Letters from Iwo Jima

• Million Dollar Baby

• Mystic River

• The Outlaw Josey Wales

• Pale Rider

• Play Misty for Me

OTHER MOVIES THAT AMERICAN SNIPER BRINGS TO MIND

• The Best Years of Our Lives

• Coming Home

• The Deer Hunter

• The Hurt Locker

• Zero Dark Thirty

• Green Zone

• In the Valley of Elah

• Jarhead

• Lone Survivor

• Full Metal Jacket

HOW IS AMERICAN SNIPER DIFFERENT AND DISTINCTIVE FROM OTHER WAR FILMS?

• This is less of a conventional combat/war film and more of an examination of the personal effects war has on a soldier. While we do see Kyle at work on the job in Iraq during his different tours of duty, this isn’t a picture with a plot necessarily driven by battle sequences or riveting action scenes. We certainly see plenty of battles and action, but they are more a means to an end—leading us inevitably to Kyle’s readjustment period back home. How do we know, even early on, that his readjustment period back home is what the filmmakers are focused on here? Because they telegraph it to us in Kyle’s wife’s doubt and frustration over Kyle’s antisocial behavior toward her and, eventually, the kids. 

• Arguably, this is one of the most effective films ever made about posttraumatic stress disorder, combat fatigue, and the Iraq war.

• This is also not necessarily a jingoistic, flag-waving, patriotically propagandist war film that takes a political side in the matter; instead, the film focuses on the difficult decisions soldiers have to make and the ramifications of those decisions over the long run. Kyle doesn’t escape unscathed from his military service. And the film doesn’t attempt to justify our combat operations in Iraq.

• Also, the movie tightens the knot for the viewer by personifying Kyle as a time bomb waiting to go off; we see how he is affected and how he acts out, even to his loved ones, and there is an impending, foreboding sense of ill fate and possible doom hanging over the proceedings.

SOME HAVE CRITICIZED THIS FILM FOR GLORIFYING VIOLENCE, EVEN IF IT’S UNINTENTIONAL, WHILE HYPOCRITICALLY TRYING TO CRITIQUE VIOLENCE AT THE SAME TIME. DO YOU AGREE OR DISAGREE?

• Dana Stevens of Slate wrote: “It’s an existential critique of violent but she is mode that doubles as a celebration of violence… Eastwood makes the viewer alternate between fear for Kyle’s life in fear for the lives of the people who cross through his gun sites – more than once, women or children, whom he must decide whether or not to shoot based only on fragments of unreliable information. There are moments when American Sniper unabashedly revels in its hero’s skill at marksmanship.”

• What can also be troubling to some viewers is what filmmaker Michael Moore expressed as his dismay over the movie’s romanticization of sniper warfare – the fact that snipers kill from a far, hidden, often safe distance, which can be regarded as much less brave or heroic than a soldier forced to engage in close combat.

• Chuck Bowen of Slant posited the following: “Eastwood normally rues the personally costly myth of the hero, only to indulge it with a righteous ass-kicking finale anyway, as he did in the great but thematically incoherent unforgiven. Or, he’ll make a pretense of examining much is Moe’s ugliness while indulging it anyway, as he did in Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, and Gran Torino.”

WHAT THEMES ARE PREVALENT IN AMERICAN SNIPER?

• “(A) warrior who is torn between the potential use and disuse of his talents,” according to Bowen. This theme is examined in several Eastwood films, including Unforgiven, Gran Torino, and Bronco Billy.

• Heroism can take on many morally troubling forms and carry a heavy weight for the hero. Kyle isn’t fighting in World War II – a war that clearly differentiated between good and evil forces and which was considered morally justified. Kyle also isn’t a close combat soldier – he’s a sniper, with impressive skills who can help America defeat its enemies. Bowen further reflected: “Heroism is a construct carried by people who bear the accompanying burden of a great undertow of alienating sadness, which springs from an intimate knowledge of the chaos that might be growing close to the bounds of civilized society’s reach.”

• The recipients of Kyle’s sniper fire aren’t just faceless video game-like targets: “There’s a real person at the other end of that gun” Kyle is told. And the camera often lingers uncomfortably on the dead bodies of Kyle’s sniper targets to remind us of the human casualties.