Weekday Movie:
American Sniper
22 January 2015
How long has it been since I’ve been to the movies? Four or five months? More? I used to go every Friday, almost without fail. I saw a lot of interesting but not-great movies, and I spent hours in nearly empty theatres. At long last, I’m beginning to miss that.
I almost backed away from the box office late yesterday afternoon. There was a line. Not a long line, maybe five or six parties ahead of me. But this more than whispered the possibility that I might not be able to get a seat on the aisle at the very back. Well, in that case, I’d just walk out — no big deal. It was worth the gamble to wait and see. Having decided to “go to the movies,” taking a chance was the only way to avoid the despond of failure into which I should certainly sink if I slunk back home. It has not been easy to amass the exit velocity required to get me out of my reading chair and then out of the apartment and back to normal city life, and it seemed important, yesterday, as I weighed the pros and cons, not to dissipate the effort that had brought me this far. In the event, I got just the seat that I wanted, and the theatre was only about twice as crowded as normal (normal for midday-viewing me). Which is to say that it wasn’t even half full.
Going to the movies yesterday made sense; the day had already been broken by two medical appointments. The upper left side of my face was bandaged in three places, and, although I wasn’t in pain, I felt, if not violated, then disrupted. Such was the thrust that propelled me to one of the two remaining neighborhood movie houses, to see American Sniper.
It wasn’t the movie that I’d wanted to see; I had thought that A Most Violent Year, which looks keenly appealing, would still be playing — but no. This left three choices. Aside from Clint Eastwood’s movie, there was Inherent Vice and there was Selma. If Inherent Vice, with its louche Seventies setting and Pyncheon background, threatened to be demoralizing, Selma menaced an exhausting uplift — I really did just want to “go to the movies.” The one thing that American Sniper had going for it was Bradley Cooper. I’ve admired Cooper ever since he played the loathsome creep in The Wedding Crashers (although one Hangover was enough), but/and there has been a consistency to his roles that the new movie promised to break with.
I knew nothing of Chris Kyle; I didn’t even know that American Sniper is a “true story.” All I knew was that the film would ring a variation on a theme already visited by The Hurt Locker. A very capable soldier puts his all into fighting for his country on repeated tours of duty in Iraq, only to find that life back home lacks color and meaning. There would be dusty, broken down Mesopotamian cities, whose empty streets would be punctured by armored trucks and gunfire. There would be arguments in a suburban house somewhere in the American Southwest, as a wife waited for her husband, only physically present, fully to come home.
What Bradley Cooper brings to this scenario is well worth its familiarity. The accuracy of his impersonation of the heroic shooter doesn’t concern me in the least; nor does the film’s utter neglect of such contextual explanations as what the war is about or why the enemy deserves to be killed bother me at all. American Sniper is not the vessel for such issues; it is, rather, a showcase for the demonstration of a particular American masculinity. The demonstration is so pure, so serenely untroubled by the existential uncertainty that this brand of manliness is dedicated to overpowering, that its exponent becomes a figure of mythic attraction. You might not like him, but you cannot look down on him. Nor can you argue that he is not a good man. You can try, as Matt Taibbi does in his takedown of the movie in Rolling Stone; you can call Kyle “a killing machine with a heart of gold.” But it won’t stick. Cooper’s Kyle does not have a heart of gold. He does, however, have a clear conscience.
Cooper’s best moments are the understated ones, when, embarrassed by attentions paid to abilities that are no more remarkable to him than the ability to tie his shoes, he can only nod, as minimally as a neck can nod, or half-bark, half-murmur the simplest assent, yes, as if straining after invisibility. The frontier between the decent discretion of a man determined not to talk about himself and the pained aversion of a man troubled by PTSD is both infinitely porous and quickly traversed. In the metabolism of the story that the movie tells, Kyle finds redemption in helping others with similar afflictions. This seems perfectly plausible: the disorder is not ignored, but its focus is prised from the secret self and brought out into the open. As long as the subject is not himself — as long as he is not being asked to account for himself in words that he obviously regards as superfluous to the record established by his deeds — Kyle can rattle along like any good old boy. Within the parameters of his firm and stern masculinity, Kyle is warm and amiable.
I didn’t know how American Sniper would end, but I knew that it was going to end, and end badly, when a datestamp suddenly appeared at the bottom of the screen. Earlier, such markers as “First Tour” and “Second Tour” had announced the beginning of each of the Iraqi episodes. Now, there was a date. Clearly something momentous was going to happen, and, given the story so far, and the way the scene begins, it seemed likely what this something would be: Kyle would be shown to have lost his wits to PTSD, and to have murdered his wife and children before taking his own life. He is shown, walking up to his wife with a revolver. But: just kidding! Kyle would indeed die that day, but as the victim of a troubled fellow veteran whom he was trying to help. But that would happen offscreen.
If it weren’t for the regrettable final scene, conceived after Kyle’s murder, Cooper’s portrayal would be altogether majestic. The scene is regrettable because it plays off of the actor’s numerous earlier performances as a manic nut-case. Those who know the Chris Kyle story going in, of course, won’t be misled; indeed, they’ll probably sense an irony that, from what I’ve since read about the real Kyle, was terribly apt. Kyle may very well have been more like Cooper’s troubled young men than, up to this final scene, Cooper’s Kyle has been, but that’s the problem: the kidding-around with guns doesn’t fit the Kyle whom Cooper has shown us. I think that it would have been far more interesting to dramatize his death.
***
American Sniper might well have been hard for me to watch. The reverent presentation of Texan virtues always antagonizes me. But Cooper eschews reverence. So does Eastwood, at least until the very end, where clips from Kyle’s obsequies turn on the waterworks. Instead of making me question whether Kyle’s conscience ought to be as clear as it is — the issue for many viewers, I gather — Bradley Cooper made me wish that Texas could be spun off as a separate planet. Texas is a very large state, but it has to be, because it is also intensely inward. It has little or no use for the outside world. The principle Texan virtue is the ability to see Texas as the Promised Land. It’s a beautiful belief, but if you don’t happen to share it — if Texas brings to mind one of the darker books of the Bible, but one in which the language of King James has yielded to a drawling and immodest demotic, then you might wish that Texas were a great deal more otherworldly than it is.