‘Tis the season for critics to pick apart award contenders “based on a true story” and point out places where their creators either bent the truth or left it out altogether. You’ve read the rumblings, for example, about how The Imitation Game gave short shrift to Alan Turing’s tragic last years and the huffing and puffing in high places as to whether LBJ was portrayed with historical accuracy in Selma.
Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper-the 34th film he’s directed-is going wide this weekend so you probably haven’t read rumblings of this sort about it. But you will. It’s based on the 2012 memoir by Chris Kyle, a Navy SEAL who served four tours of Iraq between 2003 and 2009, racked up 160 confirmed kills and earned the title of most lethal sniper in US military history.
Bradley Cooper grew a beard and packed on 30 pounds to play the Texan. All but unrecognizable, the actor extends his streak as “The Last Member of the Wedding Crashers Cast Anyone Would’ve Expected to Achieve Awesomeness But Did And Then Some.” He gives a quietly powerful performance, earning himself an Oscar nomination for Best Actor (the film is also up for Best Picture).
Except for mostly brief, fidgety stateside interludes in the company of his increasingly concerned bride (Sienna Miller), the story unfolds in Fallujah and Ramada where Kyle becomes known as The Legend for his ability to give fellow soldiers cover from a rooftop. To say the movie works as a companion piece to 2008’s The Hurt Locker is an understatement.
American Sniper bristles with the same electricity, is set in similar locations and likewise is told from the vantage point of a specialist who finds himself in a place where he doesn’t belong, and yet feels, more than at any time in his life, that he’s precisely where he belongs.
Eastwood stages the scenes of confrontation masterfully. This is one of the very few war movie told from the viewpoint of a sniper and the director, now 84, takes full advantage of the unique perspective. On one level-as in the opening scene in which a mother and child are tracked in Kyle’s crosshairs-it’s a white-knuckle, edge of your seat action film. On a second, more contemplative one, it’s an exceptionally perceptive character study.
Unlike The Hurt Locker’s Sgt. William James, Kyle doesn’t keep coming back because of an addiction to the rush of war. His problem is he goes into withdrawal the minute his rifle and scope are taken away because he feels the power to keep his brothers safe has been taken away as well. As a boy, his father told him there are three kinds of people: sheep, wolves and sheepdogs and that he was born to be the third.
That obligation haunts Kyle once he comes home until the day fate does him a favor by leading him to a veteran’s hospital and the realization that such places are filled with broken brothers who also need his help. And, with that, he finds a new mission.
So, about the rumblings coming soon: You’ll be hearing that Kyle’s insurgent counterpart, a Syrian-born sharp shooter called Mustafa (Sammy Sheik) was invented by screenwriter Jason Hall. That Kyle didn’t really enlist after watching the towers fall on 9/11 as the film suggests. And that his book contains batshit fabrications about being hired by Blackwater to snipe at looters after Katrina, getting into a bar fight with Jesse Ventura and other loony nonsense.
The important thing is what you won’t hear-namely a single word suggesting Chris Kyle was anything less than an American hero.
WORD’s OUT that KYLE was KILLED to SILENCE him.
Seems he was going to come clean in the face of the Ventura challenge
and much else.
EASTWOOD’s project is entirely compromised.
What comes of –STEPPING ON— some 5 decades of milestone anniversaries
for the now 21st century DEFINING – – – -KOREAN WAR.
TAKE HEED