Direct hit

It is beyond tiresome that every War on Terror film that is not overtly concerned with criticizing American foreign policy and the U.S. military immediately becomes a political flash point. Pundits left and right wear their reaction as a sort of I.D. badge, and the actual movie becomes a nearly irrelevant factor in a much bigger conversation.

Thanks to its box office success (not to mention six Oscar nominations), American Sniper is falling prey to this even more than similarly themed predecessors Lone Survivor and Zero Dark Thirty. In fact, in Sniper’s case, “success” is probably an understatement. When an R-rated movie without a single superhero or blue CGI character earns $105 million over a holiday weekend in January, it is more of a cultural phenomenon. As such, the commentary on Sniper has grown all the more intense. On one side Sean Hannity and Breitbart News hail the film for its patriotism; on the other, The New Republic accuses it of mythologizing a “hate-filled killer” and actor Seth Rogen likens it to Nazi propaganda. It’s hard to see how either side justifies such simplistic reductions of a highly nuanced and personal film.

What American Sniper offers is an authentic story full of resonant details that to some degree speak to wider issues but are never directly about those issues.

In crafting the narrative, director Clint Eastwood and screenwriter Jason Hall drew on Chris Kyle’s best-selling memoir as well as the recollections of his wife, Taya. With these two sources, it’s hardly surprising the film stays tightly centered on how Kyle (brilliantly played by Bradley Cooper) became the deadliest sniper in our military’s history (the focus of Kyle’s book) and the personal repercussions he and his family suffered after he left the service (the focus, according to interviews, of Taya’s input).

At the risk of gender-stereotyping, this is exactly how most married couples I know would relate their experiences—the husband describing the mission and how he carried it out, the wife sharing the emotional toll the mission took. Within their two points of view are specific realities to make any tunnel-vision partisan uncomfortable.

Liberal viewers may clutch their pearls at Kyle’s blunt assessment of Islamic extremists as evil, but only if they avert their eyes from tactics like torturing children and enlisting mothers to strap bombs to their little boys. It is justifiable to call the perpetrators of such horrors “savages,” as Kyle does, and to take satisfaction in killing them before they can carry out any more savagery.

Yet Eastwood also avoids shaving off the parts of Kyle’s persona that would make him more palatable to religious or conservative moviegoers. He’s a hard-drinking, hard-talking man (profanity and war violence account for the film’s rating), and we get a distinct sense from his wife that he puts on a warrior’s face to avoid thinking about what his line of work is doing to his soul. Indulging any doubts could get him or those under his protection killed, but not indulging them has made him, in Taya’s assessment, less human. Likewise, though Kyle carries a Bible, there’s little evidence it means more to him than a talisman from his childhood. When another character asks him if he holds any particular faith in any particular god, Kyle responds, “You’re not getting weird on me, are you?”

I believe audiences are turning out to see American Sniper in part to honor veterans of a war whose stories have been lost in exactly the kind of media wrangling we are now witnessing. Along with everything else it does, the movie portrays the enemy we are up against in the most unflinching terms, and it allows us to feel gratitude and respect for those who have undertaken the fight. More than this, however, I believe audiences are drawn to a story that faithfully portrays the complexities of the soldier who inspired it. In telling his story, it tells the story of countless others, not with chest-pounding and not with hand-wringing, but with truth.