Kyle Gallner and Bradley Cooper. Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Selma is under attack for refusing to accept the status quo—that President Lyndon Johnson did all he could to advance a civil rights platform. By depicting Johnson as preoccupied with other issues, even recalcitrant about black demonstrations, director Ava DuVernay has been criticized by everyone from Joseph Califano to Maureen Dowd.
The impact has been real, both on the movie’s box office and on its Oscar nominations. Selma is being punished for being too liberal.
American Sniper, on the other hand, is drawing flak for being too conservative. Originally scheduled for release in 2015, Warner Bros. pulled up its opening day to qualify for this year’s Oscars, a move that resulted in six nominations.
Initial industry reviews for Sniper were outstanding. Todd McCarty in The Hollywood Reporter called it “taut, vivid, and sad,” and pointed out correctly that it would be a hit with middle America (“that part of the public that doesn’t often go to the movies”). Justin Chang in Variety noted how the movie “subtly undermines and expands its protagonist’s initially gung-ho worldview, as [director Clint] Eastwood deftly teases out any number of logistical and ethical complications.”
Then the backlash started. A.O. Scott in The New York Times complained that Eastwood was promoting the dubious premise that “violence is a moral necessity,” and observed that “[t]he politics of the Iraq war are entirely absent.” American Sniper not only wasn’t “complicated” enough, it evoked “nostalgia for [Bush’s] Manichaean approach to foreign policy.”
New York magazine critic David Edelstein was even blunter, called American Sniper “scandalously blinkered” in Vulture. “It’s a Republican platform movie,” he blasted.
Other writers piled on. Frank Bruni in a New York Times blog called Sniper “absurd” and “dumbfounding” because protagonist Chris Kyle “believes that just about anything is warranted in defense of what he bluntly states is the greatest country on earth.” His column partner Ross Douthat (yes, that Ross Douthat) brought up the movie’s “conspicuous lack” of politics.
And in part of a dismaying trend, journalists like Rania Khalek attacked not the film itself but its source material. Pulling passages from Kyle’s memoir, she concluded that any movie about the soldier represents “dangerous propaganda that sanitizes a mass killer and rewrites the Iraq War.”
Then actor Seth Rogen chimed in, comparing Sniper to Nazi propaganda in a tweet. Documentarian Michael Moore tweeted that snipers were “cowards.” (Both Rogen and Moore have stepped back a bit from their earlier comments.)
American Sniper has turned into a sort of litmus test for political viewpoints. If you’re liberal, you hate the movie’s politics, its affectless style, its refusal to comment on Bush’s policies, torture, oil, or any other aspect of the Iraq War.
If you’re conservative, you jump on anyone who opposes the movie. (Khalek was told to kill herself by one Twitter user whose account was deactivated.) Sean Hannity, Sarah Palin, and other right-wing commentators have added to the noise—noise that has helped lead Sniper to box-office records.
What’s perhaps most depressing about the increasingly knee-jerk reactions to Sniper is how the movie itself is being overlooked. I called American Sniper the best movie of the year in my review, largely due to Eastwood’s command as a director, but also for what I see as his ambivalence towards violence.
Part of the power of the movie is precisely what critics have complained about, its “affectless” style. Eastwood doesn’t tell viewers what to think (apart from some poorly written scenes between Kyle and his wife). He presents a scene, a situation, a moment, and asks you to reach your own conclusions.
Eastwood has done this his entire career, in movies as innocuous as Bronco Billy and as taut as Tightrope. In Unforgiven, he questions everything the Western genre stands for. His lead character, a hired killer, faces disaster when he begins to examine himself. Violence is a terrible, corrupting evil. And yet no one at the time complained that Eastwood failed to discuss the politics of the West, or was seen as endorsing Manifest Destiny. Or that he approved of assassins.
Eastwood is a brilliant filmmaker because he presents his vision quickly, precisely, and powerfully, without fuss or trickery. When he is at his best, every image, every shot, every edit counts. And yet what he doesn’t say, what he omits, is as important as what he leaves on the screen.
So, yes, the American soldiers call Iraqis “savages.” But Eastwood doesn’t show them that way—apart from one documented instance, the Iraqis in Sniper are people, parents, children, merchants, soldiers, in one case a sniper just like Kyle.
And yes, Eastwood doesn’t directly criticize Bush war doctrines—except none of these doctrines work. In Sniper, the American war effort is a resounding failure that achieves nothing except casualties and further enmity.
To show Eastwood’s restraint, his ambiguity, take a key scene in Sniper when a veteran meets Kyle and his son in a car wash. The veteran thanks Kyle for saving his life. Eastwood doesn’t remark on this, he doesn’t tell viewers whether either character is right or wrong, he simply closes in on Bradley Cooper’s face as it registers pain and doubt. What does the scene “mean”? What does it say about heroes and hero worship? Can you accept the veteran’s gratitude while acknowledging its terrible impact on Kyle?
This is the work of someone who has learned over the years that wrong and right are never fixed, and who has the skill to convey that on screen.
You have to willfully distort what the movie shows to think that American Sniper endorses violence, the Iraq War, war in general, snipers, or Bush’s politics. Any politics, for that matter. The writers who find nostalgia for Bush are unable to see Sniper on its own terms. Or are unwilling to see past the often regrettable stands Eastwood has taken in public.
But a critic is supposed to judge a work on its own merits, not on what he or she wants it to be. Scott apparently wants Eastwood to condemn Bush-era policies, but doesn’t Sniper do precisely that? Doesn’t it show that being a sniper, a patriotic soldier, a hero to his peers, crushes Chris Kyle? The war all but destroys his family, it kills his friends, it leaves him a broken man plagued by terrors, unable to exist in society.
Taking just what Eastwood includes in the movie, no one—liberal, conservative, pacifist, warmonger—can argue that the director thinks what happened to Kyle was good. Nor did it somehow benefit the country, which is shown as largely indifferent or clueless to the realities of Iraq. If the war does this to Kyle, a standout patriot, what does it do to the rest of us? (Eastwood shows what it does to the Iraqis in graphic terms.) And how responsible are the people who put our country in that position?
Yes, Kyle kills people, that’s what snipers do. And although he tells a psychiatrist that, “I’m willing to meet my creator and answer for every shot that I took,” the movie shows the exact opposite, a man haunted by his actions, frozen by uncertainty. It is as telling and damning a vision of the Iraq war as any Hollywood movie has dared.
