American Sniper: There’s a rush, but it leaves you with a hole in your heart

Perhaps since “Apocalypse Now” and “Platoon”, there has been no war film that doesn’t have the sanitized veneer of a Tinseltown product such as Robert Zanuck’s “The Longest Day.” Make no mistake, I love that 1962 film, which has a documentary-drama feel and featured many actors who are actually war veterans in action on that fateful day of June 6, 1944 at Normandy, France.

However, I prefer films like “American Sniper,” adapted from the autobiography of the late US Navy Seal Chief Petty Officer Chris Kyle, American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History, because they portray the brutalities of war that leaves no side unscarred. These are conundrums for they are filled with complexities that leave you feeling ambivalent.

This Clint Eastwood film does not celebrate triumph or military success. It stays clear of trying to justify the war in Iraq and the bloody quagmire that resulted after the occupation. Keep in mind the simple truth of the film are the horrors of Kyle’s four tours of duty in Iraq and his and his family’s dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder.

“I didn’t risk my life to bring democracy to Iraq. I risked my life for my buddies, to protect my friends and fellow countrymen. I went to war for my country, not Iraq. My country sent me out there so that [expletive] wouldn’t make its way back to our shores.”

Eastwood has this line from Kyle’s autobiography repeated several times over in the film in different ways so understand that it does not justify war nor does it say that it was wrong. And Eastwood gets it. It is not a soldier’s place to question or ask why but to merely follow orders.

And that is where the heart of the story is.

While Kyle is celebrated as an angel of death, he downplayed it in real life. You could see how respectful he was when interviewed on television whether by Conan O’Brien or Time Magazine.

Bradley Cooper’s transformation into Chief Petty Officer Chris Kyle is uncanny. He does look like the former US Navy Seal and he got that Texas twang down pat. He shows the dichotomy of Kyle’s character. Sure of himself in battle but when the adrenaline rush dies down and he’s back Stateside, he’s jumpy, contemplative, and well, not there. But he is respectful. And Cooper puts in a masterful performance.

The kill numbers are something Kyle prefers not to talk about because he knows – for all his reference to the enemy as “savages”, they are human beings. He prays for a young kid to drop the RPG launcher so he wouldn’t have to shoot him. As someone watching, you want to say out loud, “Shoot!” yet you also wish the kid would put the weapon down and run away. Twice the film puts you in the situation where things aren’t so cut and dried. You come away and wonder, “What would you do? Would you pull the trigger right away?”

The film opens with Kyle and his spotter positioned above the rooftops where a woman and her child are planning to throw a grenade at the coming American troops. Kyle initially doesn’t know if they are armed or not. Only when he sees them as a clear and present danger does he squeeze the trigger.

Later on, there’s the incident with the boy who picks up the RPG from a faller Iraqi fighter. The tours in Iraq are interspersed with scenes of a slowly deteriorating situation at home with his family.

You are put in Kyle’s shoes and know that it is a difficult job. In real and reel life, Kyle preferred to wonder about the number of lives he saved or wasn’t able to save and that’s what kept him going back into Iraq. As Sienna Miller’s Taya Kyle, the soldier’s wife asks in the film, “When is enough enough?”

Miller’s Taya needs to reel him out. And hopes to bring him back to the person he was before the war. She nearly loses him but is able to bring him home. Only to lose him later on to a mentally disturbed war veteran who shots Kyle and a friend dead at a firing range.

When film critic (Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone) and screenwriter (The Age of Innocence and Gangs of New York) Jay Cocks was interviewed for a documentary on Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket,” he nailed with this line, “It’s a purgatory (the war soldier find themselves in). There is no right or wrong. It’s just get the hell out any way through.”

It’s dehumanizing and the sympathy you feel is for what Kyle, his buddies, and combatants from all sides lose as people.

A Clint Eastwood film makes you come away thinking. His films are about people wrapped in all the complexities of life and the circumstances that wrap themselves around them. While this certainly isn’t the first film about life during the wartime and their time back, it is nevertheless a powerful one.

When I first saw Birdy, that 1984 film starring Matthew Modine and Nicholas Cage about a Vietnam War veteran who becomes obsessed with becoming a bird, I came away from the barely filled theater shaking my head in disbelief because it’s such a sad story.

There’s the angry and angst-ridden Tom Cruise film “Born on the Fourth of July.”

And there’s Eastwood’s “Gran Torino” about a Korean War veteran with a dislike for his Asian, Latino and black neighbors until circumstances pull them all together.

Then as in now, I came away after seeing American Sniper” shaking my head in disbelief. No, it’s not a bad film. I think it’s a good one; powerful enough to make you look to look at any war in a different way most especially in the light of the recent massacre of those Philippine National Police-Special Action Force men in Maguindanao. It makes you reflect on values, on life, about loved ones, sacrifices, and choices. We oft forget these because of the daily grind. So these lessons come back in jarring fashion through personal or national tragedies. Or some times through films like American Sniper.

Chris Kyle went to war and did horrific things (although justifiable). He nearly lost his family but found his way back only to senselessly lose his life not to an insurgent’s bullet but to a mentally disturbed war veteran.

War is really hell. So it is incumbent upon us to really work hard in ensuring peace.