As by far the highest grossing film of the eight Best Picture Contenders, I probably don't need to tell you that American Sniper is the story of Chris Kyle, the "most lethal sniper in U.S. military history" (as the subtitle of his autobiography, upon which the film is based, explains). Predominately following his multiple deployments to Iraq in the 2000s, the film also gives us brief tastes of his formative childhood, decision to enlist, and training. It also touches on life at home between deployments -- and it is this area that deserved more time and focus.
As a movie character, Chris Kyle is frustratingly uncomplicated. The least charitable interpretation of him would paint him as an adrenaline junkie with a heightened sense of duty. This is familiar ground, a cocktail presented much more effectively in a recent Best Picture winner, The Hurt Locker. A more fair analysis would dub him an Ahab chasing his white whale. This too is familiar ground, covered quite powerfully in Zero Dark Thirty.
The most charitable take on Kyle would be to call him a life-saving hero who did what had to be done. Perhaps this might be more easily said of Kyle the real-life man; the movie doesn't do a particularly effective job at saying this of Kyle the character. The single best scene in the movie comes when he has to face a tangled-up moral trap of a moment in the field, actually coming face to face with his own morality while at war. The movie lets him off the hook by not exploring these scenarios more. Moreover, it uses a couple of early childhood flashbacks to demonstrate a childhood that seems to square away any deeper issues by explaining his behavior with an overly simplistic psychology.
Meanwhile, the film seems not to realize the powerful emotional elements it does have right there in the mix. The scenes dealing with Kyle's wife back home are the most consistently moving of the film. It's Taya Kyle who comes off most heroic, always dependable, always standing by her husband, and making Herculean efforts to understand him. Through her, far more than through Chris, the film illustrates the personal cost of going to war -- but without more screen time to really explore this, she will no doubt come off to some people as the nag who keeps her man from his True Calling.
Perhaps more frustrating is an abandoned subplot involving Chris' brother. Early scenes set up that the two are most certainly not cut from the same cloth. When they both decide to go to war, you know it's not going to go well for the brother. The film starts to pay this off in a short scene halfway through, where Chris briefly reunites with his brother, who indeed is haunted and hollowed out by his experiences. But this potentially interesting contrast is never shown again.
Instead, the movie tries to present as little moral complexity as possible, instead opting for a more traditional war movie that largely apes the plot of (in my opinion) one of the more blandly traditional of war movies -- Enemy at the Gates. Boiled down, this film could just as easily have been called Sniper vs. Sniper.
Bradley Cooper is solid as Chris Kyle. The script doesn't give him many gears to work with, though he does convincingly present one face in the battlefield and another one at home. This being his third Oscar nomination for acting in a row, he seems destined to win the award eventually... but I feel the recognition in this film should have gone to Sienna Miller, who as Taya Kyle does even more with far less screen time.
I give American Sniper a C-. It feels like a lengthy missed opportunity.
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