American Sniper

I cannot in good conscience call Chris Kyle anything but an American hero.  He dutifully served his county, made it back to be with his family and his death was a tragic shame. I feel genuine sorrow for his family and can only wish them the best. I genuinely hope that American Sniper is something they can be proud of.

In Clint Eastwood’s film depicting Chris Kyle’s life, both in and out of the military, we see a man who struggles to juggle so many roles.  At first, Kyle (Bradley Cooper) is a cowboy with a cheating girlfriend.  Then he joins the navy SEALS, making it through basic training with recruits much younger than himself.  At the height of Kyle’s military career, he is known as the Legend, due to his fatally accurate sniping skills.  At home, he is a husband and a father.  Trying to fill all these roles, all these levels of masculinity, is exhausting, especially when the war is so hard to leave behind.

The bulk of the film takes place during Kyle’s four tours in Iraq.  As the man behind the gun, Kyle does not seem to take pride in the fact that he has so many kills, but that he has saved so many of his men.  Rather than lay on a rooftop waiting, at times he volunteers to help on the ground.  And as the film progresses, to give Kyle a more tangible enemy, there is an Iraqi sniper that he must take out, before he takes any more of his friends.

The heart of the film is at home.  Home is where Kyle becomes emotionally distant with his wife, where he visits injured friends and where he attends their funerals.  One of the greatest scenes, in my opinion, was where Kyle is sitting in a bar alone.  At first, it seems like a perfectly normal thing for a guy to do, just grab a beer and relax.  Then his wife calls and asks when he is coming back to the states.  He tells her he is stateside, his voice breaking and tears welling in his eyes.  He might be just down the street.  But the fact that he would rather sit alone in a bar than get back to his family as quick as possible breaks my heart.  Maybe he needs some time to think, reflect, get himself ready to see his wife and kids again, or maybe it is too much to bear.  Whatever the reason, that moment is what resonated with me the most.

Cooper’s Oscar nominated performance and transformation into Kyle is astounding.  His physique from last year in American Hustle into this role is a dramatic change.  Here, Cooper has gained a great deal of weight, muscle, a beard and a voice that makes him sound like a Texan good ol’ boy.  In Silver Linings Playbook or American Hustle, I am never unaware of Mr. Cooper under that trashbag or perm, but here his image is nearly lost in this incredible transformation into Kyle.  This makes three acting nominations, three years in a row for Bradley Cooper.  Well done, sir!

American Sniper is nominated for six Academy awards, including Cooper’s latest lead actor nomination.  The others include best adapted screenplay, film editing, sound mixing, sound editing and best picture.  I’m sure Clint Eastwood was considered by much of the Academy for best director, but this year other directors simply shined brighter.

That being said, I don’t think American Sniper is far from my favorite film this year.  At times, this film feels like a modern-day Sergeant York.  There are so many firefights, by the time we get to the climactic point in Kyle’s military career, I was bored of all the gunfire.  Worst of all, this film seems way too unsympathetic toward the Iraqi people and it does not feel like Kyle and the other soldiers are really helping the peaceful civilians there, but making their lives much worse.

American Sniper has already broken box office records and millions more will see it.  The film honors a great soldier and Cooper’s performance is worth the watch.  However, it is a tough film to stomach, due to a lot of gritty, realistic war violence and profanity.  Watch responsibly and leave the kids at home.

“I wanted to be a cowboy, but I did that and felt I needed something more.”

Mystic River

Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River is a thriller, wrapped in a murder mystery, guided by a haunting childhood experience.  Set in Boston, the film begins with three boys playing street hockey and lose their last ball in the storm drain.  With no game to play, young Jimmy finds some drying cement and a stick.  He writes his name, then Sean, timid Dave goes last, but only gets two letters in when a man interrupts, “You boys think it’s okay to destroy municipal property?”  Scared, the boys assume the man is a cop and he takes Dave away without much fuss.  Apparently, nobody gave these boys the “Stranger-Danger” talk.  From a minimum of words and images, we assess that young Dave was locked in a basement, sexually assaulted and escaped through the woods four days later.

Skip ahead twenty-five years and the boys are grown and have grown apart.  Jimmy (Sean Penn) is a remarried widower favoring his nineteen year old daughter from his previous marriage, Katie (Emmy Rossum).  He’s also a convenience store owner and spent two years in jail sixteen years ago.  Dave (Tim Robbins) is devoted to his son, playing catch with him everyday and taking him on walks through the old neighborhood.  Dave’s wife, Celeste (Marcia Gay Harden) is devoted to him, even though he can be distant.  Sean (Kevin Bacon) is a detective with Boston’s homicide department.  When Katie is found murdered after the same night Dave came home late covered in blood, the three lost boys are brought back together and we assume we know how everything will play out.

Sean Penn’s portrayal of Jimmy earned him the Oscar for lead actor.  He is able to pull off the family man side as well as the jail hardened man, seeking revenge on his daughter’s death.  His greatest moments are his depictions of grief with his face contorting in agony not even realizing he’s crying.  In the scene where Katie’s body is discovered, Penn raves, spits and wails like he’s going mad.  He becomes a frightening image and I’m not surprised that he requested an oxygen tank after shooting that scene.

In contrast, Tim Robbins won the Oscar for best supporting actor by playing Dave with a different kind of intensity.  He’s very calm, soft-spoken and seems distantly remorseful about Katie’s murder.  His horrible childhood experience has made him an enigma we’re afraid to touch.  It has caused him to become very close to his son and inspires bedtime stories of a boy escaping from wolves in the woods.  He’s very creepy and obviously messed up from his trauma, but is he dangerous?  And if so, to who?

I try not to give anything important away in my reviews, but I have to advise first time viewers not to assume anything right away.  I made the mistake of relaxing through the middle of the film, assuming the most obvious connections.  Because I had my mind set, the film felt sluggish for a while and when events started to turn I felt a little frantic, asking myself, “How did I not see that?”  Perhaps that’s what the plot is supposed to do, mislead you into a false sense of security then light a fire under your ass until the end.  Well played Mr. Eastwood.

“Sometimes I think, I think all three of us got in that car.”

Unforgiven

In Unforgiven, the romantic ideas of the gun slinging cowboy are brought to a much darker light.  After a couple of cowboys cut up the face of a whore, their punishment is just to give the saloon owner a few horses.  The poor girl will be labeled hideous and useless for the rest of her life, so to seek justice, all the whores in the saloon pull their savings together and put a one thousand dollar bounty on the men who cut the girl’s face.  That sort of paid vigilante work attracts a young man who calls himself The Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett) who passes the news onto Will Munny(Clint Eastwood).

Munny was once one of the most dangerous men around.  He would drink whisky and shoot a man for no real reason.  But when he married, Munny gave up that rough life for her and she bore him two children before she died of smallpox.  Now, with two growing children to feed and the farm work not paying too well, Munny decides to recruit his old friend Ned (Morgan Freeman) and catch up to The Schofeild Kid to ride out on one last job.

The film is set in 1880, where the wild west is becoming more tame.  Guns aren’t even allowed in the town of Big Whiskey.  It’s only the old timers like Munny and Ned who remember the real wild west, helped shape it and have now settled down on their own farms and under the roofs of cabins.  It is the young men, The Schofield Kid and knife-happy cowboys, who seem to want to go back and live out their father’s tales of gun slinging, lawlessness and chaos.

Problem is, I feel like the older men just let this happen, maybe for old-time’s sake.  Munny decides it’s convenient, he needs the money, time for one last run.  Sheriff Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman) is building himself a nice little cabin to settle in and yet he kicks the shit out of English Bob (Richard Harris) in the middle of town.  Later Daggett pushes Munny too far and the wild west explodes with all it’s old violence and destruction one last time.

Perhaps they let this play out to show the young men that being a wild west outlaw isn’t all whiskey, women, gun smoke and riding off into the sunset.  There are some real dangers, repercussions to your actions and pain in your soul you’ll live with all your life.

In the end, Unforgiven is a gritty western that spits on classic romantic ideas of wild west cowboys.  Do we honor Munny and The Schofield Kid as heroes for serving justice or villains for gunning down these men?

“It’s a hell of a thing killin’ a man.  Take away all he’s got, and all he’s gonna have.”

Million Dollar Baby

Let’s be honest, no one wants to watch women fight unless there’s going to be bikinis and jello.  But let’s set that horribly sexist world aside for a moment and dream that a woman who was nothing but trash all her life can become something bigger than herself.  A fighter.  Champion of the world even.  Our Million Dollar Baby.

Frankie Dunn (Clint Eastwood) owns a little no-frills gym where he trains young men to be boxers.  He’s been training most of his life.  He goes to church every day, often pestering the young priest afterward with odd and inappropriate questions about God.  His daughter won’t have any contact with him, all his letters just get returned back to him.  And he won’t let his current fighter into a championship match.  Frankie may not realize he’s in a rut or see what’s right in front of him to help him out.

Maggie Fritzgerald (Hilary Swank) has been practicing at Frankie’s gym for a while.  She’s a spunky woman with more ambition and heart than any man Frankie has trained.  After watching her practice on her own with no training, Frankie and his partner Eddie (Morgan Freeman) can’t take watching her make her little mistakes over and over.  Frankie is dead set on not training her, but after one little talk with the poor woman just trying to punch her way out of her white-trash roots, he starts training her.  To train boxers, you’ve got to be tough, but Maggie hits a soft spot on Frankie.

Training Maggie isn’t just a wash.  With Frankie’s help, she quickly rises to a great fighter and in no time Frankie puts her in real fights.  Her technique is to win quickly, often knocking out her opponent in the first round.  Frankie gives her the Celtic nickname of Mo Chuisle and it isn’t long before crowds are chanting it.

At the heart of Maggie is a fighter, in all walks of life.  It’s only after she bares her white-trash roots to Frankie agrees to train her.  She saves the tips from her job as a waitress to buy her own boxing equipment and as she becomes a successful fighter, she tries to help her family out by buying her mother a house.  The generous gesture is only met with dismay and worry about being kicked off welfare.

It takes some real guts for a woman to portray a boxer.  This is not a glamorous role for Hilary Swank, but she brings all the guts, heart and ambition that make a fighter great.  She has the balls enough to bring Maggie’s winning personality through a broken nose and rise to the occasion with blood flowing through her eye.  Few actresses can do that and this makes Swank completely badass.  And don’t knock her in the later, more tragic half of the film.  That one sentence telling off her lazy-ass mom has just as much gusto as a good right hook.

The meat of the film is that both Frankie and Maggie are lost, lonely and determined souls.  And the impact they have on each other’s lives is moving, heartbreaking and nothing less than astounding.  With this being a beautifully visual film with a huge heart, I can agree with the best picture award.

But just to let you know how close the pick for 2004 was for me, I was awake most of Thursday night with Sideways ready to post, wondering if I had made the right choice.  In the end, it was Million Dollar Baby’s visual style, working in and out of the lights and Swank’s amazing acting that finally let me sleep.  Besides, I believe there needs to be more great films with a woman in a non-traditional role.  And afterwards, I looked up how much it would cost to hang a punching bag in my office, but that’s a dream for a paid writer.

“It’s the magic of risking everything for a dream that nobody sees but you.”

Letters From Iwo Jima

Directed by Clint Eastwood, Letters From Iwo Jima is the better half to Flags of Our Fathers and depicts the Japanese side of the landmark battle of WWII.

The film is centered on the story of a young soldier named Saigo.  He was once a baker with his wife and now a reluctant soldier.  His attitude is on the verge of treason, so he keeps his mouth shut, despite his ideals.  But it’s his unsoldier like traits that allow him to do great things in the battle and preserve historic treasures.

As the battle draws nearer, the outlook becomes grimmer.  The mainland isn’t sending air or naval support to the troops on Iwo Jima.  The generals realize that the battle will become a suicide mission, and they encourage their men to die with honor.

This sort of honor might be controversial and horrifying to some people.  In Japanese culture, it is more honorable to commit suicide than to be captured by the enemy.  Images of soldiers standing together in a cave, with the silent pressure to take their turn pulling the pin of a grenade, pushing the button against their helmets and clutching it to explode on the cave walls and their comrades are disturbing to say the least. I usually love blood and gore, but with the theme of suicide, I was being pushed to limits I didn’t know I had.  This was one of the first times I wanted the realism toned down.  Eastwood is welcome to take that as an honor and a burden for my nightmares at the same time.

In the battle scenes, this feels like Saving Private Ryan on Iwo Jima.  They’re just as intense, graphic and chaotic, it even does a few seconds of first person camera to engage you in the battle more.  One thing Letters did that Ryan didn’t was make me much more fearsome of a flamethrower.

A word of caution, the entire film is in Japanese.  So if you’re not into reading subtitles the whole time, maybe check out Flags of Our Fathers instead.  That film might make you feel a little more patriotic, instead of watching the good men we fought against so long ago.

“We can die here, or we can continue fighting. Which would better serve the emperor?”