'American Sniper,' a film that a great many people got wrong, turns 10

The Bradley Cooper Iraq War movie, an American version of what Israelis call a “Shoot and Cry” story, was widely misunderstood by left and right alike.

When Clint Eastwood’s film American Sniper arrived in theaters ten years ago, I kicked off one of the most bitter movie-related culture wars of recent years.

The film, set mostly during the Iraq War and starring Bradley Cooper as the late Navy SEAL Chris Kyle — the most prolific and deadliest sniper in American history — was seen by many on the left as a loathsome, jingoistic celebration of an immoral war, and many on the right as an unqualified celebration of that same war and of American patriotism in general. Both left and right imagined an unambiguous, rah-rah, bombs-away version of the movie.

In truth, American Sniper is neither of those things. To the point where I’ve long suspected that quite a few of the people who latched on to Sniper as a culture war talking point never actually got around to seeing the film.

American Sniper opened in a few theaters at Christmas in 2014 and is, therefore, a 2014 release, but the film opened in wide release on January 16, 2015, 10 years ago this week, upon which it dominated the box office in the early part of 2015 and emerged as the highest-grossest war film of all time.

The film tells the story of Kyle (Cooper), who grew up in Texas, worked for a time as a ranch hand and rodeo cowboy, and then was inspired by the African embassy bombings in 1998 to sign up for the Navy SEALs. We see him as a kid, hearing a metaphorical speech from his father about “sheep, dogs and sheepdogs,” which is not too different from the “dicks, pussies and assholes” refrain from Parker and Stone’s Team America: World Police.

The rest of the film cuts between Kyle’s four different tours in Iraq, a portion of the 160 credited kills he had in that war, and his personal life, including his courtship and marriage to Taya (Sienna Miller.) Miller has often played long-suffering wives — including in Foxcatcher, which came out just a few weeks before Sniper — but this was by a significant margin the best performance of her career.

American Sniper does show a great deal of traditional, very suspenseful war action, mostly centered around Kyle’s battles with “Mustafa,” a rival Iraqi sniper who is introduced as a former Olympic medalist. And the film, on that level, is very strong.