We did it, Write Readers!
We made it all the way through! We are at the last of the last, finishing our journey with American Sniper, the second war move that didn’t feel like a war movie. I didn’t cry as much as I expected to during American Sniper, because my brain has discovered that 21st century warfare (or a film of it) doesn’t look like Platoon, or War Horse. It actually looks like James Bond. It looks like one man, running around, with his gun going “pew pew”, saving American lives because he’s awesome. More on this later. I managed to keep it together until the very end of American Sniper, and so will bookend my Oscar journey with films in which I wasn’t a giant pansy.
What is American Sniper, you ask? I’d be happy to tell you! American Sniper is the biopic of Navy Seal Chris Kyle, directed by Clint Eastwood and written by Jason Hall. It is the film adaptation of Kyle’s book American Sniper: The Autobiography of the most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History. The film stars Bradley Cooper as Kyle and Sienna Miller as his wife, Taya, and was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Actor for Cooper.
American Sniper tells the tale of Chris Kyle, a Navy SEAL and one of the deadliest marksman in U.S. military history. Kyle started out as a rodeo cowboy, until he saw news coverage of the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings and decided to enlist in the Navy. Throughout his training, we see that Kyle has met his future wife Taya at a bar, and eventually they decide to marry. Very soon after their wedding, Kyle is sent to Iraq after the 9/11 bombings of the WTC. Kyle goes on four tours of Iraq, and earns himself the nickname “The Legend.” Throughout the film, it is clear his largest regrets are of the guys he wasn’t able to save, and when he is at home with his wife, he is distracted, and focused on being overseas again. She is clearly unhappy with their marriage, and with Kyle’s lack of commitment to being at home with his family. While he is overseas, we see him working to eliminate an enemy sniper, “Mustafa”, and finally Kyle spots him and takes him out from 2100 yards away, which is the 8th longest sniper kill ever recorded. After this shot alerts the enemy to the whereabouts of Kyle’s team, Kyle realizes that he’s done, and wants to go home. Although wounded and nearly left behind, he does make it back home to his family. Kyle struggles to adjust to civilian life, and admits to his psychiatrist that he feels guilty being home when he’s perfectly capable of being back in Iraq, saving the lives of more men. The psychiatrist then sets him on the path of saving the lives of the men who have come back home, and Kyle begins working with wounded vets in the VA hospital. In 2013, Kyle was killed by one of the vets he was working with.
This is one of the few Best Picture noms that doesn’t really feel like it’s about the acting. It’s really about the whole film, the whole message, the whole story. Of course, there are wonderful performances in the movie. Bradley Cooper was nominated for Best Actor, so definitely he was doing something right. But this film seems to me to be more about the story, more about an American hero, about a man who was saving lives, about a man who fought for our country, even about PTSD and the horrors that vets experience at home, not just overseas. This isn’t a big flashy film with lights and camera and action, it’s a gritty biopic that gets down in the dirt with Cooper to paint the picture of what it’s like to be at war in the 21st century. Having said that, I’m going to talk about the acting performances because I always talk about the acting performances, and because Bradley Cooper. I have no idea what is happening for this man’s career, but I like it. Much the McConaissance (don’t worry, I didn’t make that up) which culminated in the winning of an Oscar for dear, sweet (and slightly crazy) Matt, Bradley Cooper is on the rise. He’s been involved with Academy Award-nominated films for the past three years, and is without a doubt one of the best leading men out there. This year, Cooper has really stretched himself with this role, and proven that he’s capable of acting outside his own box. One of Cooper’s strengths is that he knows what he’s good at. Usually, he’s playing the slightly off-kilter, goofy, slightly manic yet lovable guy, as we saw in Silver Linings Playbook two years ago, and American Hustle last year. I don’t know if he’s just great at playing himself, or if he has a strong grasp on his type, but he does what he does exceptionally well, and it’s earned him his own Best Actor noms before. But this year, Cooper steps out physically, having gained a ton of weight and muscle for his role as a SEAL, and mentally, taking on the strong, silent type throughout much of the film. Here, Cooper only speaks when it’s needed, and much of what he says comes through his insistence on protecting the Marines, and in the bodies he leaves in his wake when he puts away his gun. This seems brutal, but it’s in the style of Cooper- blunt and putting it all out there. His silence is telling, both at war and at home. His dialect work is fantastic- I was very impressed with his “good ole’ southern boy” accent, and even more impressed by the way he kept the bubbling madness corked, but with the suggestion that in Chris Kyle it could come uncorked, if circumstances went the right way. Cooper is still open, honest, and finds lightness at every opportunity, but here he spends more time in the shadows. It’s a side of him we’ve never seen before, and he really shines. Have you noticed that I haven’t said anything about the other actors in the film? That’s because none of them hold a candle to Cooper’s work. Although Sienna Miller is working hard on-screen with Cooper, she ends up sounding like a single note throughout a jangling, confusing mess of sounds. She’s harping, over and over about how weird Cooper is being. She’s worried about him. She want’s him to come home. The woman sounds like a broken record, and although she is clearly playing the part, Miller’s performance is stagnant and unvaried. It gets old pretty quickly.
Can we now talk about the most important part of this film? Because the depth of this film doesn’t really have much to do with camera placement or costume choices (certainly not true, they all support the film and make it stronger). The writing and the direction, to me, brings home a conversation we all need to be having. In Zero Dark Thirty, really the film was about the American search, the desperate need for peace and rest that we all felt after finding out Bin Laden was gone. Chastain represented all of us, the spirit of the nation, in the exhaustion of looking, the fear that he could come back, the scar on the nation’s psyche. The “war” wasn’t really the focus, it was the backdrop. To me, here, in American Sniper, the war is the backdrop for the transformation of human beings when they engage in a battle of lives, and only one person between the two comes home. The portrayal of the psychological damage of war is astounding, and a triumph. It’s one of the most anti-war films about war I’ve ever seen, without throwing anything in your face. The heroic acts of Kyle are not diminished as we see what happened when he was at home. His feats are no less special when compared to the way he struggles to connect with his wife and children, when we see the torment and guilt he feels when he got out, but could have (physically) stayed in to keep fighting. American Sniper brings to light a wildly necessary discussion that the nation needs to be having about the ways in which we take care of the veterans who fight so bravely for our safety.
American Sniper is a moving story, a frightening and vivid tale of what we win and what we lose when we send our boys to war. When I said above that it doesn’t feel like a war movie in the way my mind expected, that isn’t a good thing. We have been so conditioned in Hollywood to watch heroes with guns take out targets numbly, to assume they’re just being good guys, by taking out the bad guys, and saving everyone around them. It’s easy to get sucked up into the superhero mentality, and American Sniper flips the script. One man, “the legend”, with more kills than anyone before him, is that superhero. He was the boogie man to all of the baddies who threaten the safety of American soldiers, and really all of America. But this time, we get to see behind the scenes. We see what it feels like to be a superhero. We see how haunted Cooper is when he gets back. We see him lose people he loves. We see him lose pieces of himself. This is the war film that isn’t a war film- it’s a person film. It’s a human film, about a person who takes the lives of others, and unlike James Bond or Iron Man, we see this hero coping with the things he carries with him as well as the things he left behind.
Americans love patriotism, and they love heroes, and they love Bradley Cooper, so I don’t know how this film will do tonight during the awards. To my mind, there were films that were better, but that really means very little, because they are all worth watching. I would highly recommend this film to anyone who wants to have a conversation about superheroes. I commend all of the superheroes in our armed forces, and am grateful that so many are protecting my freedom, and the freedom of their country. I can only hope this film gives us a space to talk about what we can do for them, after all they’ve given for us.
Best of luck to all of the films who have been nominated. They are all deserving of Hollywood’s highest honor. If you have a favorite or a guess about who will win, you can tweet it to @TheWriteTeach on Twitter. I’m looking forward to watching tonight, and hoping you’ll all watch with us!
Live, Love, Learn,
Rebecca &