American Sniper.

Lighter, Jonathan E.

American Sniper (2014) is director Clint Eastwood's hagiography of Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, whose 160 confirmed kills in Iraq are the highest toll exacted by any military sniper in American history. And true to Hollywood form, almost every memorable moment is either invented or embellished, to judge from Kyle's bestselling autobiography of the same name, written with the aid of Jim DeFelice and Scott McEwen. The media has already noted that Kyle's nemesis, a roving marksman called Mustafa, whose sniper skills are nearly equal to his own, is mostly a plot-driving fabrication. (Think Enemy at the Gates') In the film, Kyle also ferrets out an al-Qaeda enforcer called "The Butcher," who kills an informer's child by drilling a hole in his skull. The Shia warlord Abu Deraa is said to be the model, but the book never mentions either. And, astonishingly, Kyle is on a Fallujah rooftop, with no real transition, shortly after al-Qaeda destroys the Twin Towers.

Such liberties--and many, many more--are no surprise. Movies do have to move, and they do tend to pander. Nevertheless the controversy ramped up here and abroad by the devices and certainties of American Sniper proves again just how seriously the ax-grinding classes take their war movies and their (or other people's) war heroes. Left-wing gadfly Michael Moore implied that the patriotic Kyle (virtually wrapped in an American flag on the posters) was a back-shooting coward. A writer in the Guardian described Kyle as "at a bare minimum, a racist who took pleasure in dehumanizing and killing brown people," while right-wing pundit Sarah Palin fired back that "Hollywood leftists" are "not fit to shine Chris Kyle's combat boots." Other critics are frightened and offended by unstudied statements made by the real Chris Kyle.

"I loved killing bad guys," he told DeFelice and McEwen. "I'm not lying or exaggerating when I say it was fun." Similar sentiments appear, just as fleetingly, in Jason Hall's screenplay, which uses The Butcher as the objective correlative of Kyle's printed words: "Savage, despicable evil. That's what we were fighting in Iraq. That's why a lot of people, myself included, called the enemy 'savages.' There really was no other way to describe what we encountered there." Such strong language from an honored American in the twenty-first century surprised and disquieted critics unfamiliar with the furies of war.

Flash back to the '80s as young Kyle's Christian disciplinarian father explains forcefully that there are three kinds of human beings: "sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs," a familiar analogy that first appeared in Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman's On Killing in 1996. The protective "sheepdogs" ("blessed with the gift of aggression," in Dad's peculiar phrase) employ the violence of wolves to guard their helpless ovine charges. Dad threatens the boy with a leather belt if he ever turns sheep or wolf, and Chris takes that commandment seriously in joining the military in the late '90s. Both book and film emphasize that Kyle's chief concern was to protect American lives.

Both versions of American Sniper emphasize Kyle's scrupulousness--enforced by witnesses, command, and regulations--in taking down only individuals who were actually aiming weapons at Americans. His first kill--a woman who was approaching marines with a grenade--was the only one that unsettled him. (On screen she leads a gratuitously invented child who also dies.) Kyle's shooting clearly did save American lives. He writes, moreover, that "Everyone I shot in Iraq was trying to harm Americans or Iraqis loyal to the new government.... Everyone I shot was evil. I had good cause on all of them. They all deserved to die." Indeed, the most strident critics of the film (and of the man) decried Kyle's level of moral certitude as reprehensible in any human being, and more so in a role-model movie hero. In the film's sole moral crisis, Kyle agonizes over whether to kill a boy who has picked up an RPG and looks ready to aim it. "Put it down! Put it down!" Kyle mutters on his rooftop as his finger begins to squeeze. The kid puts it down, runs away, and Kyle collapses in relief: but unquestionably he would have fired. The real Kyle says, however, "I wasn't going to kill a kid, innocent or not." (If the movie is trying to show that both sides in war victimize children, there may be better ways to do it.)

But American Sniper (2014), like it or not, is an absorbing, well acted, very atmospheric piece of filmmaking. Besides its immersive sense of place (the urban devastation is, in movie terms, "post-apocalyptic"), it expresses with immediacy much of the bravado of bestselling memoirs like Marcinko and Weisman's Rogue Warrior (1992) and Luttrell and Robinson's Lone Survivor (2011). (Hollywood has long given up on introspective warriors like Gary Cooper's Sergeant York, Henry Fonda's Mister Roberts, or even Tom Hanks's Captain Miller in Saving Private Ryan.) As Chris Kyle, Bradley Cooper is by turns rowdy, affable, tough, conscientious, brutally menacing, and stolid. Like the real Kyle, he is finally preoccupied--not by his kills but by the memory of Americans, including friends, his shooting "couldn't save." He stares at his living-room TV, the soundtrack exploding

with bombs and machine guns: the dollying camera then shows that the TV is off. Sienna Miller as Kyle's wife Taya is believably fearful for his safety and the future of their marriage. Kyle's postwar self-therapy is to devote his spare time to wounded, traumatized, and amputee vets. This led to his shocking death in 2013 at the hands of an unhinged vet he had taken to a gun range as a therapeutic exercise.

In the end, though, Eastwood and Hall's undemanding American Sniper is not very enlightening and not very deep. (At least the pop Freudianism of an earlier sniper movie, Jarhead, was junk-food for thought.) His father's Manichaean values enabled the extroverted, physical, good-natured Kyle to kill repeatedly and remorselessly in war; yet his thousand days in Iraq between 2004 and 2009 led to anguish for his family and a distressing sense of his own limitations. The movie ends with news footage of Kyle's 200-mile, Texas-size funeral procession and his well-attended memorial ceremony at Cowboys Stadium.

Clearly a crowd-pleaser, American Sniper is the highest grossing war film ever, having earned by Oscar time more money than all other best-picture contenders combined. In the book's 2014 edition, Taya Kyle expresses satisfaction that "the essence" of the couple's story is now permanently "out there." But it would be interesting to know precisely which details of that essence moviegoers have found most compelling.