American Sniper

Clint Eastwood’s film about Chris Kyle, adapted by Jason Hall from Kyle’s own memoir, is built the way Kyle’s job was: one man, one rifle, one narrow view of a street. The tagline calls him the most lethal sniper in U.S. history, and the film takes the phrase at face value. Four tours in Iraq, a wife and children in Texas, a count that keeps rising. It is tense and cleanly made, Bradley Cooper is good in it, and we cannot recommend it, because for 133 minutes it looks only where Kyle looks and never once turns round.

The opening is the film at its best. Kyle lies on a rooftop over a Fallujah street, a marine convoy is coming, and a woman steps out with a boy and hands him something. Joel Cox and Gary D. Roach cut between the scope, Cooper’s eye, the street and the radio in his ear, and they hold each shot a beat longer than is comfortable. Eastwood keeps music almost entirely off the soundtrack, so there is only wind, the radio and breathing. We were tight in our seats and glad of it. Then we noticed the film had not the slightest interest in the woman, and the feeling curdled, and it never quite came back.

Cooper plays Kyle as a man with no doubt in him, and puts the damage in his body instead. He is heavy, slow-blinking, quiet, and he spends the home stretches sitting in front of a television that is not switched on. Tom Stern shoots the Texas suburbs in flat, grey, overcast light, so the house Kyle comes back to looks colder than the war he leaves, and Deborah Hopper keeps him in the same hunting jacket and ball cap at home, as if he has never fully changed out of uniform. It is careful, physical acting, and Cooper makes a man who barely speaks worth watching for two hours.

Sienna Miller has the harder job. Taya gets one scene per tour, and each is the same scene: he is going back, she says he is not there even when he is here, he says he is protecting people. Miller finds something different to do with her face each time, which is more than Hall’s script has bothered to. The scene in which Kyle takes her call from a rooftop while a firefight starts around him is the one time the film puts the two halves of his life in one frame, and it is a proper scene.

The war itself is a matter of targets. James J. Murakami and Charisse Cardenas build Iraqi streets of rubble and rooftops, all the colour of the dust, and Stern bleaches them to a hot ochre, so that anyone moving stands out against a wall. That is how a sniper sees, and it is also how the film sees. There is an enforcer called the Butcher, whose methods we will not describe, and a rival sniper called Mustafa, dressed in black and given no lines. Every other Iraqi is a body in a doorway, a shape on a roof or a man who may or may not be reaching for something. Nobody in the film asks what they want, and nobody on screen appears to wonder.

Eastwood has done this differently. In 2006 he made Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, two films about one battle, one from each side, because he thought both sides had a story. Here he makes one film and points it one way. A sandstorm sequence late on, in which the fighting disappears into a wall of brown and the film with it, is the nearest he comes to saying the whole business made no sense, and it is over in minutes. The ending is abrupt in a way we will not describe, except to say that it hands the largest questions to a title card.

See it for the rooftops, for Cooper, and for Miller doing a great deal with a little, and see it on a big screen, where the scope has room to work. Do not go looking for the war. It is not here. Only the man on the roof, and what he can see down a tube.