Terminal velocity

American Sniper

Crit

This was not a film I was eager to see so much as it was one I felt obliged to see, given the consensus acclaim. And my enthusiasm was dampened further when I saw the astonishing box office numbers for its first weekend of wide release: how many of those 90 million, I wondered, went to see brown Allah worshipers get their brains blown out, and did I want to align myself with that demographic?

Well, fuck all that liberal navel gazing: this is, without a doubt, the best work Clint Eastwood and Bradley Cooper have done, by an order of magnitude, an astonishing plumb of the depths of complexity and ambiguity by a simple mind haunted by its own inability to incorporate ambivalence. The worst thing Cooper's Chris Kyle has done in the first 30 years of his life, as far as we know, is steal a pocket Bible from his church as a boy. The Bible goes with him for four tours of duty--a total of about 1,000 days--in Iraq, where his gift for snuffing a life from distance is put into unquestioning, unquestionable service of God, country, and his comrades in arms.

The cost is exacted when he returns Stateside, but in body only, his psyche still "in country," a hemisphere away from his wife and children. We've seen that phenomenon before, of course, but we've never seen it sold quite like those hunted blue eyes of Cooper sell it.

I've paid no attention to the Oscar® nominations until just now, and I'm glad to see Cooper has been nominated--and he should win, though the other 4 performances were certainly Oscar®-worthy too. But how the hell does the picture get nominated as Best Picture but Clint doesn't get nominated for direction? Well, with 8 BP noms and only 5 for BD, I guess part of the answer is simple mathematics. Or maybe what cost him a nod was three seconds late in the picture that only a film school freshman could have thought was a good idea (you'll know it immediately when you see it), or the ten seconds a few minutes later that a bright sophomore might have included. I was annoyed by both of those bits, but also sort of grateful, because I would have hated to have to call the film perfect.