2 hrs & 12 min, color, 2014
How strange and ironic it is that a motion picture that concerns itself with brash courage should be so lacking in that very quality. The true story of Chris Kyle, a Navy SEAL who has probably seen more combat than any other man who has ventured into the Middle East military arena, with a record of sniper hits far surpassing all others of his compatriots, should lend itself to a diligent and thorough and unique study of war’s effect upon even the most superior combatants. Who else has been the closest to the fire?
We have heard a lot about PTSD; in no previous military commitment that our nation has made on a grand scale has more attention been given to the aftereffects of exposure to combat – the war the fighter brings home with him, in so many respects more formidable than the one he tries to leave behind. The media have not only given scrupulous report of so many examples of physically maimed men who walk around with prosthetic legs and arms, but the magnifying glass has also been applied to those with relatively little physical injury but who have psychic and emotional scars that are just as handicapping and debilitating. I expected much about this phenomenon from this rather lengthy biopic.
What we have instead is an exercise in overkill – literally – as an ambitious action film would have it. Instead of a thorough character study, I found myself crawling with our “hero” through one bloody battle encounter after another during a total of four deployments. I was forced to trudge and trudge through the dust and grime, more and more grunginess, more and more shootouts and dangerous combat operations. I am sure we have seen a body count here that has set a new record. I am used to those high counts in a fictional drama – spy fare, cop fare, cloak and dagger, etc. – but what made the scene so grueling this time was the factual basis for the details. The one-on-one encounter with enemies, allegedly derived from actual military files, gets much further under the skin in an oppressive sort of way for a sensitive viewer such as myself. I felt dragged along over the terrain of the battlefield, not led through it with taste and perspective.
A sniper has the task of protecting the lives of the troops by taking out would-be snipers from the enemy side and anyone on the move to ambush or sneak attack those troops. He must have eyes sharper and an aim narrower than anyone else who carries a gun. Kyle ran up a legendary score of killings, serving the war effort for four years in Iraq from 2005 until 2009, carrying home all kinds of medals and commendations for bravery before he retired and ironically was killed in February 2013 in his own country, at a practice shooting range in Texas, by a demented civilian of unknown motive. He was only 39 years old when it happened. (The killer is currently serving a life sentence without parole.) It was before he died that Kyle managed to write his best-selling autobiography of the same name as the movie, published in 2012. Clint Eastwood grabbed it up for a movie adaptation, which he produced and directed.
Bradley Cooper’s range as an actor is well known; he is perhaps the most focused of any up and coming male star of the screen, but I do not feel as if his powerful presence got the chance to reveal itself enough in the playing of Kyle. What he does he does potently, but so much more ground could have been covered and explored.
Speaking as a writer, I perceive that a far better way to have adapted the book would have been an out-of-sequence approach. I would have begun the film with his final return from the war, perhaps a regaling of the man for his exploits and achievements and his final step back into civilian life. Then I would have been selective with flashbacked moments in combat that are triggered by his painful adjustment to his new reality. Four years elapsed between his discharge and his death. What he underwent internally during that time would have been a theater of war far more worth visiting, far more instructive and far more absorbing.
There are two instances that give us a taste, but only a taste, of what I am talking about. At an outdoor family gathering his little boy is doing some rough playing with a dog, something the boy is not new at and something he is obviously enjoying. Chris loses his sense of time and place and rushes to “rescue” the boy and starts to deal a death blow to the dog, when his wife Taya stops him. What triggers this reaction may well be his having once killed a child carrying a grenade for the insurgents and about to wipe out many of his buddies. He has learned bitterly about children being exposed to lethal forces, when he has had to release that force himself. But that is only a guess on my part. A counselor’s attempt later to engage him in discussing this incident he unfortunately rebuffs, and there is no further reference to the matter.
The other takes place outside a hospital maternity ward. Chris is looking at his newborn daughter lying in her tiny crib, when the girl starts not only to cry but to scream, demanding feeding. The squall goes on and on. The nurse behind the partition acts as if she does not hear Kyle calling to her trying to direct her attention to the baby, and his raised voice she ignores as she dotes upon another baby. He is so upset that he pounds on the glass, but to no avail. The nurse cannot hear. I assume this is a dream sequence, because even if the glass sealing off a maternity ward is constructed with sound proofing (as some of them are), a trained nurse would not turn a deaf ear to a screaming infant and the hysterical father’s pounding would set up a vibration if it did nothing else.
Such hallucinatory experiences on the part of veterans who are back in the States have been widely reported, but how susceptible Kyle was to such psychic confusions remains obscure. It seems as if the screenplay is depicting him as so superhuman that he supposedly recovers from these moments with no help or support from any direction, including the loving and loyal wife, played smartly by Sienna Miller.
Over the years during which she sees little of him due to his repeated departures for the battlefield, she lets him know how remote he is becoming from the family. He is not the man she married. She warns him: “You’ve got to make it back to us.” She also delivers what may well be the most profound line of dialogue in the whole script: “You can only circle the flame but so long” before you are pulled into it, and maybe consumed by it. But after he is home for keeps we are never treated to her insights and misgivings again. Does he make it back?
The film makers apparently do not have the courage to explore the internal war Kyle must have waged, once he was home from the external one. The movie is almost over before that fourth deployment ever comes to an end. Those years following are just skimmed over. We never get to see how the man prevailed over his demons or if he ever did. Before we know it, that fateful day of his death has arrived, a day on which he acts as if he has eluded his internal foe. All right, maybe he has, but how? Why not let us in on that process? I have great respect for Mr. Eastwood; he has turned out some great work both as actor and director in his forty-eight years in the business, and technically the picture is Class A. But I am disappointed that only one war Chris Kyle fought is treated in depth. There surely is another, however little or much he discusses it in his book.
To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website: enspiritus.blogspot.com. To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.
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