‘American Sniper’ a rich study of war’s impact

REVIEW

‘AMERICAN SNIPER’

Grade: A

Cast: Bradley Cooper, Sienna Miller. Directed by Clint Eastwood.

Running time: 2:12

Rating: R for war violence, language, sexual references.

By Colin Covert

Star Tribune

Clint Eastwood carried guns for generations onscreen. As a filmmaker he sees male heroism as a question, not an answer. Behind the camera he makes stories that focus on painful, alienated men. There were blue-collar Bostonians scarred by an abusive past in “Mystic River,” and views of war punishing a nation’s own soldiers in his World War II duo “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Letters From Iwo Jima.”

“American Sniper,” Eastwood’s 37th film as a director, is his darkest, tightest, most morally ambiguous drama since he shot the western dead with “Unforgiven.” It is a rich study of combat violence without a moment of jingoism or propaganda. Its central focus is the psychological wounds that haunt a top U.S. marksman from the battlefields of Iraq to his Texas family home.

The film is equal parts biography and war film, with its protagonist not a tightly focused portrait but a metaphor about what happens to countless veterans. It dramatizes the life of the late Chris Kyle (played by a bulked-up Bradley Cooper), the deadliest sniper in American history.

Cooper, an actor known for emphatic and memorable dialogue, delivers a deeply felt and moving performance as the strong, silent Kyle. We meet him at an aimless period in his youth. Though he was a good rifleman since childhood and a strong rodeo rider, he was directionless until two things happened. He married Taya Renae Kyle (Sienna Miller). And on Sept. 11, 2001, he decided to join the elite Navy SEAL program to defend his country.

Exhausting training matures Kyle from awkward, wandering galoot to one of the nation’s finest fighters.

Eastwood is sympathetic toward veterans, critical of what combat does to them. He powerfully stages the war’s shootouts, standoffs, the crackle of gunfire and struggles against a rival Syrian-born shooter as lethal as Kyle. The film is stunningly shot by cinematographer Tom Stern, a regular with Eastwood for a decade. The grand plan of the combat is never quite in focus, but emotional wounds are the story’s linchpin.

Kyle is proud to defend his nation but never exultant. What he does touches him like a waking nightmare.