"American Sniper" is many things -- it has plenty of action, some moments of suspense and horror, a strong lead performance from Bradley Cooper, and some interesting moral and political quagmires that it works its way through. It's also jingoistic, at times fatuous, and overall feels like a completely missed opportunity to do something extraordinary.
This is another film by that stalwart director Clint Eastwood, a Hollywood icon who at 84 doesn't seem to be slowing down very much. This is his second film released that's eligible for awards in 2014 (his musical romp "Jersey Boys" made its budget back during its summer run), and "Sniper" is already garnering lots of awards attention from the Director's Guild and the Academy, with Cooper, the writer, picture editors and sound mixers/editors and the picture itself all getting nominations for Oscars.
I hear it's a true story.
Ostensibly it's a film based on the autobiography of Chris Kyle, a decorated Navy Seal sniper who served four tours in Iraq. He became known as "The Devil of Ramadi" by those he was sent to kill, and "The Legend" by many of his fellow soldiers. The film follows Kyle from his life as a rodeo cowboy into the heart of the American military machine that gears up after the 9/11 attacks.
We follow Kyle as he gains more and more confidence on the battlefield, only to have nagging feelings of stress and uncertainly when he returns home. His reintroduction into civilian society is helped out by his helping other soldiers, until that too takes a tragic turn for the worse.
This all sounds good!
It does, and on paper the film should be a knockout. Kyle's story was well-reported, thanks in part to the popularity of his book and the events that surround the finale of the film. The issue with Eastwood's work, however, is that it feels all extremely heavy-handed.
The notion of being a sniper in warfare lends itself beautifully to cinematic representation. The gunner is essentially looking through the equivalent of a camera lens, while we as an audience are picking out details with the help of the focus of the camera work. We can zoom in and see the smallest detail, or get a wide shot to provide us perspective. There's a scene where Kyle must decide whether or not to shoot a child, and his spotter cautions that they'll fry him if he makes the wrong call. It's clearly a moment of arch storytelling, but it effectively draws an audience in.
The issue, then, is that these moments of moral greyness are splattered with jingoistic certainty. If we forget the extra-textual issues with Kyle's accounts (many of the stories in his book have been refuted as fabrications or downright deceptions, a fact that the film skirts around), one is still left with a feeling that we're getting a pretty two-dimensional account of what's transpiring for Kyle.
You sound cynical.
Perhaps I am, but at his best Eastwood can give us a genre action movie with a great deal of heart and intelligence. "Unforgiven" is a classic, of course, but even his World War II films "Letters From Iwo Jima" and "Flags of Our Fathers" provided a heap more substance behind the jingoism.
Worse, the circumstances around Kyle's fate are handled badly simply from a dramaturgical point of view, as if that element was simply tacked on. The ramifications of the finale are actually far more interesting and provocative than what much of the film focuses on, yet it doesn't fit the rah-rah storyline that's far more conveniently and conventionally told.
Still, it's at least kind of OK, no?
Well, if you can get past the rubber baby.
The what now?
There's a scene with a newborn and the leads are cuddling what's clearly a synthetic human being. Clint's renowned for not wanting to spend a lot of time on set, churning through takes in a way that would make multi-take masters like Fincher or Kubrick lose their minds. I'm guessing this is the reason to eschew an actual infant in favour of the silicone kind, but it makes for a risible moment that should actually generate audience sympathy.
That's nitpicking.
Yeah, but there's also not much else going on that captures one's imagination. I left the screening feeling more disappointed than annoyed, thinking that even within the right-wing rubric of Eastwood's politics we could have had a robust and serious film about the events that Kyle lived through. Instead we get what's really a quite superficial look at the man going through all the expected ramifications of a life in battle.
The notion that even a cowboy hero can get scared is hardly revelatory for anyone but the most hardened of cynics. The very notion of heroism, however, goes mostly unchecked, and for the most part all other characters, from the victims of Kyle's weapon right through to those closest to him, seem to have little depth save for how they serve to tell the story of his reactions and his behaviours.
So, should I bother?
Well, there are plenty of other awards contenders out there I'd probably try out first. That said, Bradley Cooper is quite engaging, bringing to the film far more class and depth than it probably deserves. I like him in this role, and don't begrudge the plaudits he's receiving for it (just as Benedict Cumberbatch in "Imitation Game" is better than the film he's in).
Charitably, you could argue that Eastwood's latest is trying in its own way to go beyond the headlines of Kyle's story, but taken as a whole, it feels far more like a missed opportunity to bring something with sophistication and grit to the screen. "American Sniper" has lots of targets to shoot at, it just feels in the end that it's firing blanks.
"American Sniper" is now playing in theatres.
from The Moviefone Blog http://ift.tt/1G8ZO96
via IFTTT
No comments:
Post a Comment