Even-Handed in Iraq

American Sniper is probably the most reviled box-office success in recent American film history. It is not that Clint Eastwood’s film is one of those big bad enjoyable movies like the Cecil B. De Mille epics many of us rather shamefacedly enjoyed in the 1950s. Discussion of this bio-pic about the late Chris Kyle—the deadliest sniper in US military history—has turned into a bitter debate over the Iraq War and the character of Kyle himself.

The furore over American Sniper is similar to the agitation in the anti-war community when John Wayne made The Green Berets in the late 1960s. Made quite explicitly by its director-star to support America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, The Green Berets provoked demonstrations at afternoon sessions at the Regent Theatre in Sydney by members of the moratorium, contemptuous reviews by most of the critics—and great box office.

For opponents of the Iraq invasion American Sniper is far worse than The Green Berets was for the anti-Vietnam War activists. The Wayne film was easy to discredit. John Wayne was never more than competent as a director, and The Green Berets was filled with preposterous errors. For many supporters of the Vietnam War it was an embarrassment. Critics of America’s involvement in Iraq, however, see American Sniper as revisionism of the worst kind; an attempt to use the experiences of a national hero to justify a war that should never have been fought in the first place. The problem for them is that Clint Eastwood at eighty-four is still one the world’s great directors, and American Sniper shows him at the height of his powers.

Although the film was shot partly in Morocco and on a set specially constructed in Los Angeles, it recreates wartime Iraq with disturbing accuracy—the distinguished cinematographer and video journalist David Brill, who has reported on Iraq since the 1990s, thought at first that American Sniper had been filmed on location. So is American Sniper brilliantly made propaganda for a thoroughly disreputable cause?

Certainly there is good reason to object to the autobiography Chris Kyle wrote with Jim Defelice and Scott McEwen on which the film is based. The first half is an account of his four tours of duty in Iraq, during which he claims to have personally killed 280 people; officially there were 160 confirmed kills. Kyle describes the insurgents as savages or bad guys, frankly admits that he longed for action and found the experience “fun—we were just slaughtering them”. It is as well a celebration of the macho culture of the US Navy SEALs, their brutal hazings, criminally dangerous training exercises and heavy drinking. None of the figures described in the book even attempts to understand that ordinary Iraqis might object to being invaded. “I don’t give a flying f*** about the Iraqis,” Kyle writes. After all, the SEALs are defending America.

The passages describing Kyle’s time home between enlistments where contributions from his wife, Taya, are juxtaposed with his narrative are very different. The style is more measured, and beneath the bravado the reader senses Kyle is a deeply troubled man scarred by his war service. The use of the telescopic lens makes sniping a horribly immediate form of killing, and even though Kyle always insisted he could justify every shot he made this does not mean he felt no guilt. Like so many ex-servicemen he was clearly suffering from post-traumatic stress when he finally returned from Iraq. It is this disturbed, anguished man screenwriter Jason Hall and Clint Eastwood have chosen to portray.

In the black-and-white morality and super-patriotism of the autobiography Eastwood and Hall find many shades of grey. The moral ambiguity is established in the opening sequence. We see a massive American tank at the head of a column of marines moving through the rubble of a deserted Iraqi town. Kyle is on the roof of a building providing overwatch—protecting the troops. A woman and a boy emerge from a building. She produces a grenade from her robe and hands it to the boy. Kyle shoots the boy, then the woman when she takes the grenade herself and throws it at the marines. Unlike Kyle, who wrote about the proud marines he was protecting, Eastwood does not take sides. The woman and boy could be heroes resisting the invader, or Kyle might just be doing his duty, or both could be true. The film leaves us with the ambiguity. Hall and Eastwood have combined two incidents from the book to create this sequence. It segues into a flashback showing how Kyle came to be in Iraq.

The scenes showing Kyle as a boy killing a deer and being instructed in simplistic moral values by his stern father are in some ways equally disturbing. America’s gun culture, particularly when it involves children, is frightening. Again Eastwood does not take sides.

He is just as even-handed in his treatment of the fictional duel between Kyle and a brilliant Iraqi sniper. Reportedly the idea came from Steven Spielberg. The device provides a link between the different action scenes, providing a dramatically satisfying explanation of why Kyle keeps re-enlisting despite his wife and children. He can only return to her when he has defeated this formidable adversary. If this sounds like a western, I’m certain it was entirely intentional. In addition, the various engagements were deliberately structured by Eastwood to evoke memories of the western—a form he understands better than any living director. He does not use just his own films. I saw echoes of Anthony Mann’s shoot-outs in Winchester ’73 and Man of the West.

Predictably, these sequences are superbly staged. Eastwood has lost none of his talent for creating exciting action and a strong narrative. According to David Brill, the director’s regular collaborator, cinematographer Tom Stern, has recreated a distinctive Iraqi light that is indistinguishable from the real thing. The designers, Charisse Cardenas and James Murakami, create a chillingly believable Iraq of rooftops and rubble.

Again, Eastwood’s treatment of the duel between the snipers is even-handed. The Iraqi is shown as supported by his community. A girl reaches into her robe for a mobile phone to reveal Kyle’s movements. It is also clearly indicated that in 2006 the Americans were losing. (This was just before the surge.) As well the film includes some American blunders. “You didn’t secure the battlefield,” Kyle barks at his officer after they have failed to protect an Iraqi ally and his family.

The sequences when Kyle returns to his family and discovers a new purpose in helping returned servicemen could easily have seemed bland after the richly textured battle scenes. They work as well as they do because of Bradley Cooper’s extraordinarily detailed performance as Chris Kyle and Sienna Miller’s sensitive embodiment of his wife, Taya. To the credit of Taya Kyle, she appears to have been open with Miller about the problems in the marriage, and this enriches the film.

Understandably, American Sniper does not portray the circumstances of Kyle’s murder by a troubled soldier he was trying to help. A hypothetical staging of the events would prejudice any hope of fairness in the trial, which opened in Texas last month.

There could eventually be an In Cold Blood-type story juxtaposing the experiences of the two men, as is demonstrated by Nicholas Schmidle’s article “In the Crosshairs” published in the New Yorker in June 2013. For the moment the insights into the tragedy of Iraq by a great film-maker will have to be enough.