In his book, American Sniper, Chris Kyle detailed his 150 plus kills of Iraqi insurgents during his time as a Navy SEAL. The book was on its way to being adapted into a film when Kyle was shot and killed by a troubled young veteran.
The story is not about war and failed policies as it is about PTSD and its toll on the nation, and one hopes that Clint Eastwood will do that story the same justice he did with Gran Torino, because unlike those who would kill illegally on city streets in America, duty and honor however programmed are desperately important to those who serve the nation. It feels like it should be like the Hurt Locker, but the box office will tell the tale that we live constantly like so many genre films, the juxtaposition of foreign war with domestic life.
This matters a lot in the scenes set between tours, which depict Kyle’s life in suburban Texas with his wife Taya (Sienna Miller) and their kids. American Sniper has more than its share of enemy-in-the-crosshairs set pieces, but these back-home scenes are the real backbone of the movie, especially the sequence in which Kyle is recognized by a veteran (Jonathan Groff) in an auto body shop, but is unable to maintain eye contact with him. The scene is a miniature master class in subdued tension and subtly discomfited acting, and, along with a scene in which Taya talks Kyle into measuring his blood pressure during a doctor’s office visit, amounts to one of the most effective and understated depictions of post-traumatic stress in the history of the American war movie.
American Sniper's 160 confirmed kills between 2003-2009
The SEALs began telling stories, and Kyle offered a shocking one. In the days after Hurricane Katrina, he said, the law-and-order situation was dire. He and another sniper traveled to New Orleans, set up on top of the Superdome, and proceeded to shoot dozens of armed residents who were contributing to the chaos. Three people shared with me varied recollections of that evening: the first said that Kyle claimed to have shot thirty men on his own; according to the second, the story was that Kyle and the other sniper had shot thirty men between them; the third said that she couldn’t recall specific details.