American Sniper

Bradley Cooper (left) portrays Navy SEAL Chris Kyle (right) in the adaptation of Kyle’s 2012 autobiography American Sniper

Navy SEAL Chris Kyle

AMERICAN SNIPER             C              
USA  (132 mi)  2014  ‘Scope  d:  Clint Eastwood                    Official site

This is a perfect example of utterly conventional Hollywood filmmaking, as it takes a simplistic, one-dimensional approach to war, patriotism, and serving one’s country, becoming a jingoistic portrayal of an American warrior who thinks he knows what his country stands for by asking no questions, where no reservations are expressed, instead it typifies the gung-ho spirit of the armed forces in much the same way as pro football player Pat Tillman was made the military poster child for enlisting in the Army in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.  His idea was to kick some terrorist ass in Afghanistan and Iraq, filled with an ideological certainty that borders on brainwashing, much like the nation’s bullheaded approach for invading Iraq in the first place, where it was inconceivable in Tillman’s eyes that America wouldn’t prevail.  Unfortunately, as the Amir Bar-Lev documentary The Tillman Story (2010) points out, it’s much more complicated than that.  This glorification of heroism is a throwback to Howard Hawks’ SERGEANT YORK (1941), released just months before America’s entrance into World War II, the story of a World War I sharpshooter that became a war hero, one of the most decorated American soldiers in World War I even as he was a devout pacifist, which won Gary Cooper an Academy Award for Best Actor.  Even Gary Cooper, however, was reluctant to play a “too good to be true” character, but reconsidered after meeting Alvin York, the real person the film was based upon.  Interestingly, according to Eastwood himself, that was the first movie he ever saw, so it obviously left an impression on him, just as the images from movies and historical photographs leave impressions on other young soldiers about how to behave during wartime, where they often emulate what they see.  Similarly, a bulked up and more bland, ideologically toned down Bradley Cooper is excellent in the real-life role of Chris Kyle, a down-home Texas cowboy who rode the rodeo circuit early in his twenties, but when he witnesses the 9/11 attacks, he reconsiders his future, enlisting in the Navy SEAL special operations force at age thirty (age 24 in real life, initially rejected by the Navy SEALS due to rodeo injuries) where he also excels as a sharpshooter and is sent to the front lines in Iraq.  As a military sniper, his job is to protect the Marines on the ground by providing an overview vantage point they don’t have, picking off anyone suspected of initiating attacks against the Marine operations.  Adapted from Kyle’s 2012 book written three years after his military discharge, American Sniper:  The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History, even the title leaves little doubt as to what the focus will be, though his modest, single-minded claim is always that he was simply doing his job by protecting the lives of others. 

While the film takes the viewer into the heart of ongoing military operations, almost exclusively seen through a guy’s perspective, it also has a stateside component where Sienna Miller as Kyle’s wife Taya offers a near-cringeworthy performance, though her character is horribly written and is equally one-dimensional, where she seems to have little sympathy or understanding for the unique adjustments soldiers must make upon returning home, as unfortunately they bring a bit of the war back with them.  Instead she nags at him continuously to be the person she married, telling him “I need you to be human again,” expecting him to adjust to her concept of a normal family life, while picking at him when he’s less than forthcoming about describing the horrors that he experienced.  Keeping much of his emotions locked in, it is only a matter of time before he is called back, as he is needed on the battlefield, eventually serving four tours of duty.  Easily the most overwrought and hysterical scenes are the ones when Kyle is in his sniper position in a moment of calm, casually talking to his wife back home, when suddenly a firefight will break out, cutting off normal communications, while she’s left whimpering on the other end of the line wondering what’s happened to her husband.  This guy is in special ops, for Christ’s sake, assigned the most dangerous missions, specially trained to be battle hardened, calm in the face of a storm, yet she doesn’t get it, remaining scared out of her wits and clueless about what this guy does for a living.  These scenes drain much of the energy from the picture, and there are several of them, where she becomes too much of a distraction, as it’s inconceivable to the public back home that wives would want to be on the phone with their husbands “during” military operations.  That’s exactly what could get them killed as it takes away from their primary focus at that moment.  The relationships with fellow soldiers may not get the same amount of screen time, but they are much more acutely drawn, as these guys understand each other, where they are trained to have each other’s backs, instilled with the same warrior mentality, yet they can also laugh in quieter moments, as they’ve each been through hell and back.

Certainly one aspect of war this film attempts to convey is the sense of urgency, where Kyle reflects the military mentality when he tells his wife that his family has time to wait, while the frontline soldiers don’t, which is what continually compels him to return.  Embellishing the mythic picture of an American hero, only Hollywood would come up with the storyline about a fellow sniper on the other side, a Syrian soldier fighting for al Qaeda named Mustafa (Sammy Sheik) who is actually an Olympic medalist in shooting.  Each is the best in their field, where the storyline continually pits one rival against the other, where much of it breaks down into a mind game, maintaining the psychological advantage, where these men become mythical legends within their own ranks.  Kyle is actually called “The Legend” by his fellow soldiers, where stories of his prowess spread throughout the military branches, where there’s a price on his head, dubbed the “Devil of Ramadi (Shaitan Ar-Ramadi),” placing a bounty on his head that eventually climbs to $80,000, which distinguishes him even in the eyes of the enemy.  This elevates his importance, as it reveals how essential it is militarily for each side to knock out the other’s best sniper.  Both are capable of inflicting huge casualties and altering the success or failure of significant missions.  Much of this is oversimplified, playing out like a western in the American West, inevitably leading to an ultimate shoot out, the winner being the anointed hero.  In Eastwood’s film, however, it nearly brings his unit down, as it exposes their position, subject to an unprecedented attack.  Taking place in a sandstorm, it has a dreamlike quality about it, turning into a battlefield of the dead, as men around them keep dropping like flies, but more continue to storm ahead, taking the place of those fallen beside them.  It offers a feeling for the senselessness of war, yet it’s also combined with the solemn tributes paid to those making the ultimate sacrifice, as Eastwood’s depiction of a military funeral is easily the best thing in the film, perhaps the only scene that touches the right grace note, (2014) soundtrack - Ennio Morricone -The Funeral - YouTube (2:05).  Kyle’s successive returns back home become more detached, told with little fanfare, yet the war continues to intrude into his life, where one of the Eastwood touches is Kyle continually hears the sounds of war taking place even when sitting comfortably on his couch back home, thoughts and sounds he wants to tune out and forget, where he can barely make eye contact or even acknowledge a soldier who graciously thanks him for saving his life.  The brief glimpse in hospitals of wounded veterans in recovery feels essential, even though it’s barely touched upon, preferring instead to dwell on the more dramatic war footage, where only at the end does the Hollywood depiction take a turn into vintage archival material, showing the actual funeral of a fallen hero, leaving the audience in the solemnity of a hushed silence, where the closing credits play with no accompanying music.

While the film attempts to honor and eulogize fallen soldiers, but in idolizing this figure, what the film overlooks are the actual hate-filled views expressed by Kyle in his book, as his zealous American fervor is spewed with xenophobic and racist venom, where killing Iraqis is the answer to his own effusive bitterness and contempt, as he is unwavering in his belief that everyone he shot was a “bad guy.”  “I hate the damn savages.  I couldn’t give a flying fuck about the Iraqis…The enemy are savages and despicably evil.  My only regret is that I didn’t kill more.”  Chris Kyle is actually a younger version of the grizzled old Korean war veteran Walt Kowalski portrayed by Eastwood himself in GRAN TORINO (2008), where his prejudiced views separate him from the changing and more complicated world around him that he can’t begin to understand, as in his mind he’s narrowed it down to overly simplistic, black and white perceptions of good or evil.  In other words, we are right, and they are wrong.  Intentionally or not, much like John Wayne in a John Ford western, most particularly THE SEARCHERS (1956), this film makes a hero out of Kyle, a special ops patriot that took pleasure in killing and dehumanizing the enemy, recalling the frontier spirit of Ford’s westerns where “the only good injun is a dead injun,” which has now evolved into “the only good Iraqi is a dead Iraqi,” where there are a lot of Chris Kyles in the world who believe in God and country and the American flag, while anyone questioning this view is looked upon with traitorous suspicion and contempt bordering on hatred, equivalent to aiding and abetting the enemy, reminiscent of the derisive and often violent sentiments expressed in the pro-war slogan “America, love it or leave it” during the Vietnam era of the 60’s.  In the unquestioning eyes of the true believers, Kyle’s unambiguous belligerence represents not only the embodiment of America’s cowboy mentality (The Cowboy Myth, George W. Bush, and the War with Iraq), but may also explain his considerable success on the battlefield, as there is no soldier remorse, no guilt or crisis of moral conscience about the act of killing when he regrets none of his actions, where in this case his complete lack of subtlety or imagination is what makes him particularly emblematic of today’s American military hero.  When faced with the choice between depicting the truth or the myth, however, Eastwood decided to go with the myth, which should come as no surprise to anyone, as peddling myths is the very foundation of what Hollywood does for a living, which is also what makes the film so predictably conventional.     

Captain Phillips

CAPTAIN PHILLIPS              C               
USA  (134 mi)  2013 ‘Scope  d:  Paul Greengrass                    Official site

In America, you just can’t explain the passion exhibited for typical Hollywood action movies like this one, as it receives all kinds of critical accolades and people buy into the deluded belief that this is good filmmaking, when in fact this is fairly typical of what any decent Hollywood director can do, and this one is no exception.  Paul Greengrass is a British film director who made a name for himself with BLOODY SUNDAY (2002), where his startling use of handheld cameras gave the viewers a near documentary, you-are-there perspective in a stunning recreation of actual events that took place in 1972 when British paratroopers opened fire on a peaceful Irish demonstration killing 14 Irish protesters.  The style was immediate, as it won the top prize at the Berlin Film festival, which it shared with Miyazaki’s SPIRITED AWAY (2001), and it remains at the pinnacle of his best work.  Since then, Greengrass directed the second and third installments of the Bourne series (2004, 2007), both extremely popular, while also directing UNITED 93 (2006), a somewhat fictionalized recreation of what happened on 9/11, for which he received near unanimous praise.  So while the man has established credentials in both Britain and America, this is not among his best work, despite the overpraised accounts, but is instead just another one of the over-amped Hollywood productions, something of a recreation of actual events when a U.S. cargo ship, the MV Maersk Alabama, was hijacked by Somali pirates in 2009, taking the captain hostage briefly until he was rescued in a daring Navy SEALS operation.  Based upon the book, A Captain's Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALS, and Dangerous Days at Sea, by Stephan Talty and ship captain Richard Phillips, the film stars the ever likeable Tom Hanks as the lead character, who actually takes a crack at a Boston accent early in the film, but it disappears throughout the film. 

While the captain’s actions have been described as heroic, some crew members have considered him reckless, as there were 16 pirate attacks and eight hostage situations in the three weeks prior to their hijacking, yet he ignored warnings to stay at least 600 miles off the coast of Somalia, presumably to save money in a shorter distance, as the ship was just 240 miles off the coast instead, where he is being sued by 11 members of the 20-man crew for reckless endangerment, and call the movie version a big lie, Captain Phillips Is a Lie: Real Captain Is No Hero, According To Crew.  Hollywood has a history of embellishing the truth, and even award Best Picture Oscars, as they did in the case of Argo (2012), often creating American heroes for their beloved stars while other equally deserving, or in some cases even more deserving actions are ignored for the sake of a fictionalized movie. While that is a major issue in the case of Argo, not so much here, even though it may earn Hanks another Oscar nomination.  The real issue here is the filmmaking itself, which goes on far too long, showing little character development, instead featuring characters screaming and yelling all the time, while exhibiting Hollywood overkill, where the constant drumbeat of rising percussion from Henry Jackman’s score just overplays its hand, attempting to push this film down people’s throats, as if that makes for an exciting, pulse-pounding thriller.   A better editing job might have helped, where the introductory establishing shots in both Somalia and Vermont are superfluous, as no backstory is really provided, or needed, while Billy Ray’s script couldn’t be more cliché ridden, showing no interaction between crew members other than the usual gripes about overwork, and equally appalling language coming from the military ship captain as they receive incoming instructions about the hijacking in progress. 

While some may be thrilled by the enthralling build-up of suspense, much of it slowed to a crawl, as the pirates attempted to locate the missing crew, room by room, step by step, going ever lower into the bowels of the ship, yet the drumbeat kept pounding, as if there was something more happening.  This is all generic Hollywood filmmaking in the style of THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE (1972), and then again in TITANIC (1997).  Not much has changed here, as except for a few brief moments, which are exhilarating flare-ups, such as the taking of the ship, the seizure of the bridge, the crew overpowering one of the hijackers, the attempted exchange of captains, and a few brief exchanges between the U.S. military vessels and the Somali pirates with the captain in a lifeboat at sea, most of the time is spent simply adrift at sea, with pirates continually arguing about what to do.  Some of what the movie depicts is borderline ridiculous, such as the pirates refusing to allow the captain, or one of their own men, to dress serious wounds of two of the pirates, as they have him surrounded with automatic rifles while he’s unarmed, so what threat does he pose?  The wound poses more of a threat, as a prolonged, untreated infection could lead to something far worse, and it was negatively affecting the ability of both pirates to maintain focus.  The real discovery here is first-time actor Barkhad Abdi as Muse, the head pirate that convincingly plays a man who’s used to facing adversity, perhaps more than any of the others, who continually stands up to Captain Phillips, and the American military, displaying a unique brand of bravery himself, even if he is an outlaw, as he has to continually keep a group of undisciplined followers from self-destructing.  Perhaps what’s most interesting about the film is Muse gets more attention than any other character in the film, including the title character, which is the one choice the film gets right.  While Abdi  is terrific throughout, Hanks really only displays any specialized acting skills in the final few moments, when he’s still in shock after the NAVY SEALS rescue mission, but those few minutes of confusion may be the most humanizing moments in the entire film.   

Zero Dark Thirty

ZERO DARK THIRTY           A-                   

USA  (157 mi)  2012  d:  Kathryn Bigelow       Official site

If anyone had suggested one of the leading Oscar contenders would be a movie about the successful hunt in tracking down public enemy number one, the leader of al Qaeda, otherwise known as the “big man” or “UBL,” Osama bin Laden, many would think this had movie-of-the-week written all over it, an easy subject to exploit and turn into a forgettable piece of feel good jingoism.  And yes, *that* movie was made, SEAL TEAM SIX: THE RAID ON OSAMA BIN LADEN (2012), created by a group of people that turned the raid into a work of fiction, completely contradicted by a true account that was written by ex-Navy SEAL Team 6 member Mark Bissonnette in his book No Easy Day, a first hand account of the attack and killing of Osama bin Laden.  What’s interesting is that screenwriter Mark Boal and director Kathryn Bigelow were already involved in making a movie exposing the unsuccessful decade-long CIA search for bin Laden when events on the ground generated a complete rewrite after he was discovered and killed in May 2011.  What follows is a meticulously designed chronological procedural, an extremely well researched piece of speculative history, based upon several meetings with the CIA and Lawrence Wright’s Pulitzer prize winning journalistic exposé, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, which describes the background for several terrorist attacks, some prior to 9/11, suggesting the subsequent investigations afterwards were largely bungled by a lack of cooperation between the FBI and the CIA, each answering to their own bureaucratic hierarchy.  In a rather provocative opening, Bigelow opens her film with a black screen, hearing only the sounds of emergency 911 phone recordings where people are desperately calling for help after the World Trade Tower attacks on 9/11.  Immediately afterwards, though some years later, we see the American response, a graphically brutal CIA prison interrogation that involves a continuously bound detainee subjected to beatings, sleep deprivation, sadistic humiliation, waterboarding, and other means of torture, all designed to extract information that is not forthcoming, even after the barbaric treatment.  

While some, including the current CIA director Michael Morell (Acting CIA Head: Zero Dark Thirty Isn’t Realistic) have suggested the film either glorifies (Zero Dark Thirty: new torture-glorifying film wins raves | Glenn Greenwald | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk) or inaccurately depicts the use of torture, especially as it so graphically introduces the audience straightaway into the dreadful details of the war on terror, but despite refusing to spare the audience from seeing various acts of torture, or shying away from exposing our nation’s culpability in these secret interrogations, always hidden away in some secret location identified as black cells, there’s not a shred of evidence to suggest Bigelow has any ulterior motives.  But that’s not stopping the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, headed by California’s Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, from launching an investigation into the CIA’s involvement with the movie (Senate investigating contact between CIA and “Zero Dark Thirty” filmmakers ), like some deep government secret was revealed, which is surely a big waste of time.  If anything, Bigelow’s film is surprisingly free of political content and instead hones in on her slowly evolving narrative, which is the decade-long search for bin Laden.  When these interrogation methods fail to prevent other al Qaeda terrorist acts from occurring, the CIA interrogation team comprised of Dan (Jason Clark), the chief interrogator, and newly arrived junior agent Maya (Jessica Chastain), believe they’ve failed.  But since their detainees are in confinement with no access to actual news, and are already sleep deprived, they cleverly decide to blur reality by rewarding them for supposedly providing helpful information that prevented the attacks, offering food as a gesture of good faith while continuing to prod them for more specific details, suggesting their fictitious cooperation helped save lives.  Overseen by CIA station chief Joseph Bradley (Kyle Chandler), we soon learn this is a different kind of war where we’re actually operating in very murky waters.  Sifting through the false leads where lies often reveal more than the truth, as lies are used to protect something vitally important, Maya sits in front of multiple computer screens evaluating hundreds of similar interrogation interviews, coldly ignoring streaming footage of terrorist explosions that the audience sees, hoping to find some shred of evidence leading them back to the “big man.”  What Maya quickly learns is the CIA is a male dominated culture that plants headlines, that leads the public into believing whatever the government thinks it needs to hear, where stopping bombers before they attack makes big headlines, while steadfastly matching up names with clues offers some potential degree of success down the road, but doesn’t pack the immediate punch they’re looking for.       

Much of the beginning shows an aimless pattern of shifting allegiances and intelligence priorities, where as soon as Maya is onto something, her superiors are no longer paying attention, as their interest lies elsewhere.  No longer focused on bin Laden, they’re instead caught up in new developments, which include taking political cover over the discovery of American atrocities in Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, where several superiors have taken the fall.  Bigelow shows an often confused picture of muddled bureaucratic disinterest, with every segment coded in military vernacular, where the audience may have a difficult time following just what’s going on, until a random televised speech by newly elected President Obama brings an end to their interrogating methods.  It’s only at this moment, where Maya’s targeted focus continues to be tracking down bin Laden and killing him, cutting off the head of al Qaeda, which like a laser beam, brings the entire picture into focus through the developments of her character.  Despite all the other power plays and political shenanigans, which continue under Obama, funding for her requested Pakistani surveillance details are not forthcoming, where she’s attempting to track down bin Laden’s own personal courier, his most trusted aide that connects him to his operations around the world even as he remains secluded.  No one except Maya believes this is vital intelligence, as the courier is not connected to any potential terrorist act.  As everyone in the picture is abandoning interest in her lead, still looking for the more glamorous headline stories, she has to literally threaten and coerce her boss, Joseph Bradley, into action, as otherwise she’d be relegated to the backrooms somewhere as a forgotten entity, an ancient relic.  Actually shot in Jordan, Afghanistan, and some mobile units in Pakistan, this picks up the adrenaline-laced intensity of the film, as the operations in the food bazaars and overcrowded streets of Pakistan are so much more dangerously riveting than similar scenes in Ben Affleck’s Argo (2012), where they’re able to tap the phone of the courier using the cell tower signal, but they continuously lose him in his constant street movement, where they can’t predict his behavior, but come tantalizingly close sometimes until finally they get a photograph, which for Maya, is like an answered prayer.             

When they’re able to trace the courier to a heavily fortified compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, for Maya, this is instant paydirt, but for the rest of the intelligence community, they need more, still speculating on what it all means, using satellite imagery to determine how many people can be seen, also confirming that one man is never seen and never leaves the compound.  When the CIA Director (James Gandolfini as Leon Panetta) reviews what they have, examining a replicated structure on a table, Maya can’t even sit at the main table with the men, and must take a chair in the back of the room.  When the Director asks who she is, Maya answers defiantly, “I’m the motherfucker who found this place!”  Later, when the President is actually considering his options, the Director and Maya have a curiously amusing conversation, as due to confidentiality, they can’t actually talk about anything that they’re working on, so they have little to say, which speaks volumes.  But apparently the CIA recruited her out of high school.  All of this meticulously accumulated background information reveals next to nothing about any of the significant characters in the intelligence community, which is the way it should be working in such a shadowy environment where personal lives are routinely sacrificed for obsessive detail in their work, where they are literally married to the job.  At about the 2-hour mark, they’re given the go ahead to send in the Canaries, as they’re called, as they still don’t know what to expect inside the compound, all except Maya who is 100% certain bin Laden is there, but she’s the only one.  Her confidence is enough for the SEALS, however, who barely bat an eye, as the depiction of this highly select military personnel is almost casual, where they’re really the last in a long line of secret operatives, where they may personify the guts and glory, but really they’re just the mop up crew.  Somebody else had to figure it all out. 

Shown in real time, taking a little less than the actual operation itself, the Navy SEALS put on their night vision goggles and carry out the mission, seen in a green light, where they have to use explosives to get through half a dozen heavily fortified iron doors.  Inside is mayhem—men, women, and children, many screaming, several of whom are killed.  For these guys, it’s just doing their jobs, painstakingly sweeping room by room, floor by floor, shooting anyone who doesn’t immediately surrender, overwhelming the enemy by superior numbers and firepower, also having to think on their feet, as those guarding the outer perimeter are perhaps most at risk, as the surrounding neighborhood gets suspicious when a helicopter goes down and crashes inside the walls of the compound, and more helicopters keep buzzing around overhead, waiting to pick up the SEALS once the mission is over.  Everything is timed like clockwork, where they get in and get out in about 25 minutes.  This revelatory sequence is the centerpiece of the film.  Even knowing the eventual outcome, it’s loaded with tension and suspense, where dressed in their gear they resemble an astronaut mission to Mars, as it has an otherworldly quality about it, like something seen in a John Carpenter movie, yet it proceeds with caution and thoughtful rationale, every movement measured until it is done.  When they return and Maya (known by the SEALS as “the girl”) identifies the body as bin Laden, it’s only then that you start to wonder who is this force behind the operation?  Is it a fictitious person or is it real?  Known only under the code name “Jen” in No Easy Day, Maya is based on a real and still-active agent working for the CIA, the kind of person who, if you talked to her, wouldn’t really have much of anything to say, an anomaly that’s likely never received this much exposure.  Enjoy it while you can, unsparing as it is, minimalist, stripped down, and increasingly suspenseful, as it’s as close to the real thing as you’re going to find.  She apparently got a cash bonus when the mission was successful and the Distinguished Intelligence Medal, but missed out on a promotion, perhaps because of an alienating email she sent out to the entire agency reminding them how they fought and obstructed her every step of the way.  Her colleagues are supposedly envious of all the Hollywood attention she has received.  Remember, in the male dominated intelligence community, the big honchos are the ones that are supposed to be making the headlines, not “the girl” that no one believed.