Late Eastwood #4: American Sniper
A few words about reckoning
Welcome to Late Eastwood, my tour through the late work of the still very much alive Clint Eastwood. This is a journey through the prolific director’s films since 2010, a period of his career with which I’m almost wholly unfamiliar. With his new film, Juror #2, on the horizon, I will be combing though the films leading up to it, so I can learn a bit more about what motivates a 94-year-old to keep practicing his art. These posts are for paid subscribers only, so you know what to do.
I wonder what Spielberg’s version of this would have been. It’s notable that before Steven Spielberg dropped the project, he’d had the script rewritten to over 160 pages, with added focus on an enemy sniper, called “Mustafa” in the film. You can feel the effect of that addition, and its whittling down. The Jaws director is one of our great psyhological filmmakers, using his preternatural gift for image-making and spectacle as a means with which to make real the turmoil in his characters’ minds. Clint Eastwood is not that kind of filmmaker. Not that psychology doesn’t enter into what he does, but his is a more plainspoken cinema. Moments and scenes and bits of dialogue and stray shots, all there to express direct meaning, with the complexity found by the viewer, reading between lines, making connections between ideas it’s not at all clear Eastwood ever considered. That’s not a knock either. It’s not the job of the artist to think of everything their art might be saying. The question of what American Sniper is saying was a topic of much debate back in 2014. I’m not sure it’s an answerable question.
The movie was released only a few months after Jersey Boys hit the screen, becoming Eastwood’s biggest ever box office success, and good fodder for the political culture wars of the day. If I identified Jersey Boys as perhaps the true beginning of this Late Eastwood period, that film is still marked stylistically by the string of films that came before it. American Sniper sheds even that. The colour palette is a bit more opened up, there’s a bit less insistence on darkness and sharp, glowing highlights, and there’s clarity in the way Eastwood brings scenes to life. I wonder how much of this is, in fact, a result of political alignment between subject and director. Eastwood is not some big warmonger, but he’s a patriot, and in his portrait of an American soldier he cannot help but heroicize. That he approaches this by making his hero complex and very much damaged is confusing for some who would like a more easy political read on the film—is it good, or is it Republican? Well, it’s definitely Republican, but that doesn’t mean much? What’s interesting about American Sniper, what makes it good, but also what holds it back, is its refusal to reckon with the meaning of Chris Kyle’s actions within the broader scope of American foreign policy.