American Sniper is Clint Eastwood's 37th film as a director. As he grows progressively enigmatic, he gets better and better at ambiguity. It's hard to tell where he's coming from, and he's willing to let an audience cook in its own discomfort because moments of great effect in his films don't tell you how to think or feel about them.
American Sniper is about the real-life Chris Kyle, a young man who went to Iraq four times as a sniper. Eastwood opens first with a grisly moment of Kyle (Bradley Cooper) with a woman and child in his rifle sight and then cuts to Kyle as a boy for scenes of hunting with his father, sitting in church or at a family dinner. Heartland scenes, but all of them tinged with ambiguity – is the father instructive or autocratic?
Do these scenes show the making of a great American hero, or a murderer?
The film's unambiguous though on the question of veterans. Eastwood loves them; he has tremendous sympathy for what soldiers are required to go through and for what war does to its participants.
When he visits home, Kyle grows progressively silent. A decent young man, optimistic and patriotic, can no longer communicate and seems to spend more and more of his time locked within himself. But the film suggests Kyle may get through that.
You can't forget those early scenes. At best, Kyle is the stereotypic strong silent type, and the movie watches him intensely to see what that means and where it comes from. The question is never answered about whether Kyle is a man of deep personal strength or his quiet demeanor is a mask to cover whatever harm that strait-laced upbringing created in him.
As Kyle stares through the telescopic sight on his long sniper's rifle the film stares at him through its camera's eye – watching and studying. He has to figure out if that man on the balcony talking on his phone is giving someone information about American soldiers, or, as Kyle's buddy says, talking to his old lady. Does the woman with her young son intend harm or not? You see all this through the crosshairs of Kyle's scope.
Even though most of the film shows destructive war, the filming is elegant. Cinematographer Tom Stern has been a regular for Eastwood since Mystic River in 2003. His Iraq images are sparkly, crystal clear – just perfect enough to emphasize the contrast between the deceptive clarity of what you see and what may be real or true. Scenes at home are just as crisp, and Eastwood doesn't show dirty dishes or laundry or any of the mess of daily life. Kyle sits at the spare dining room table reading, a bowl of fruit posed beside him.
It's a spotless life.
Clint Eastwood is a confident director. He doesn't need to explain that the crisp surface of Chris Kyle's life makes it impossible to get close to Kyle or to understand what he is or how he is. When the movie reaches its sad end – Kyle was murdered by another vet – there's the by the book ritual and sterile precision of the military funeral.
The best movies, of course, take place mostly inside each one of us. It's about what people do with what they see.
American Sniper never tells you how to think or feel or react. You may think Kyle's father is a horror and a despot; you may think he's training an impeccable son to understand duty and honor. The movie never takes a position on the war – it's the landscape where Chris Kyle plays out a huge chunk of his life. It's not the war an administration lied its way into, just as it's not the war to bring peace and justice to the Middle East. It's just the war Chris Kyle decided to join.
Remember, Clint Eastwood also made Letters from Iwo Jima, from a Japanese point of view with neither explanation nor apology. American Sniper doesn't make it easy for us, and it shouldn't.