American Sniper (2014, R)

My second of this year’s eight best picture nominees (it was nine last year – are they gradually working their way back down to five?)  Right off the bat, I’ll cop to some strong cognitive dissonance when I started watching American Sniper.  Don’t ask me how, but I’d managed to get it in my head that the film was about the DC sniper, so imagine my surprise when the previews finally ended and the film got started.

Nope – American Sniper is also a true story, but a very different one.  It focuses instead on Chris Kyle, an aimless cowboy who finds purpose in the SEALs.  He becomes “the legend,” a sniper with an unprecedented kill record over the course of several tours in Iraq, and starts to lose himself in the process.  He’s uncomfortable in the skin of his civilian life, and his wife feels him slipping away as he throws himself time and time again into danger.

This, I think, is where the film best succeeds.  It’s a complicated but ultimately sympathetic portrait of a man changed by his war experiences.  The growing stateside evidence of Chris’s PTSD – his reaction to loud noises, or the tense, vigilant eye he keeps on cars in his rearview mirror – are effective, as is Chris’s the-gentleman-doth-protest-too-much insistence that he’s all right.  War has crawled inside him.  He’s risked so much, seen such horrors, and done unspeakable things (his first kill isn’t anything like he would have envisioned,) but he feels this panicked need to brush aside his trauma and justify all he’s experienced.  It’s why he dismisses any talk of therapy and raises his hackles whenever anyone questions the uprightness of the war.  He has to remain fit for duty, and his war has to be just, or else what was the point of staring into the abyss until it stared back?

If the film does well with its theme, it’s not as careful in its storytelling.  There’s an odd, staccato feel to the pacing, like we leap from scene to scene with little to show the passage of time.  There isn’t much sense of transition, which makes it hard to settle into and be submerged in the world of the movie.  It feels jarring to me, and surprisingly lax for such a high-profile film.

Bradley Cooper does a fine job with Chris’s journey; it’s a large, impassioned performance that really shows the changes the character undergoes.  Siena Miller is nicely affecting as Chris’s wife Taya, and though I’m not familiar with most of the ensemble, their performances help you invest in the film.  However, I did find a fewrecognizable faces:  Leonard Roberts (D.L. from Heroes) and Kyle Gallner (Beaver from Veronica Mars,) and Jonathan Groff appears in one strong scene that I thought was really well-done.

Warnings

Strong graphic violence, language, drinking/smoking, sexual content, disturbing images, and dark thematic elements.