“So-called ‘sand movies,’ the term Hollywood sometimes uses for films set in Afghanistan and Iraq, have a terrible box office track record,” noted the New York Times. Or rather, they had a terrible box office track record. The release of American Sniper, a biopic about Iraq war veteran and legendary Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, has changed all that.
The film, which opened wide January 16, shattered the record for the largest opening weekend of a film released in January, a month traditionally considered a graveyard for ticket sales. The film pulled in $105 million its first weekend against its $60 million budget—and the film that previously held the record for largest January weekend is Avatar, the highest-grossing picture in history. Already, American Sniper has the markings of a cultural phenomenon. In exit polls conducted by CinemaScore, movie-goers rated the film A+. Phil Contrino, chief analyst at BoxOffice.com, has attributed the film’s success to a massive outpouring of favorable attention on social media.
Naturally, the commercial and artistic success of American Sniper—it received six Oscar nominations—has liberal Hollywood deeply conflicted, and pockets of the left outraged. This success can be largely traced to Clint Eastwood’s surefooted direction, as well as Bradley Cooper’s understated and Oscar-worthy performance. But it’s been 13 years since 9/11, and the war on terror has been at the forefront of American culture and politics every day since then. Politics probably explains why it has taken Hollywood this long to make a truly great and popular movie about this war.
In content and tone, American Sniper is distinctly different from the sand movies that preceded it in that it unambiguously celebrates the heroism of the soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. In this, American Sniper is in rarefied company. Last year’s Lone Survivor—based on a book by Kyle’s good friend and fellow SEAL Marcus Luttrell—and the little-seen 2009 HBO film Taking Chance are about the only other notable exceptions to Hollywood’s seeming obsession with delegitimizing the war on terror and those fighting it.
The list of films that stand in stark thematic contrast to American Sniper is long. Just to name a few: MTV Films made Stop-Loss, with Ryan Phillippe, Channing Tatum, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, in which a group of young soldiers nearly run off to Mexico rather than go back to Iraq. It was little more than a sexed-up infomercial warning young men off military service. In the Valley of Elah, starring Tommy Lee Jones, was a tepid murder mystery masquerading as a morbid meditation on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Washed-up auteur Brian De Palma made Redacted, a graphic film about American soldiers who rape an Iraqi girl and murder her family. Matt Damon starred in Green Zone, a heavy-handed thriller about a government conspiracy to hide WMDs in Iraq. (Green Zone was loosely based on the work of Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran, who was widely rebuked for misrepresenting his need to be evacuated by helicopter from his military embed in Afghanistan. The real reason he wanted out: to attend the film’s celebrity-studded premiere.) John Cusack was a twofer. First he starred in Grace Is Gone, a film that egregiously wallows in the grief of a man who can’t bring himself to tell his kids his wife was killed serving in Iraq. Then he made War, Inc., a painfully unfunny satire about corporate profiteers amid a war in the fictional country of Turaqistan.
It should not be surprising that such politicized films had little appeal for the American public. Even some of the better films in the genre, the Academy Award-winning The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty (both directed by Kathryn Bigelow), were deeply ambivalent about America’s post-9/11 defense. And these films were only mild improvements in that their protagonists, fighting in these wars, were respected for their commitment and professionalism. The Hurt Locker was largely ignored in theaters. And it’s telling that the Oscar campaign for Zero Dark Thirty was stymied by organized opposition to the film’s acknowledgment that enhanced interrogation techniques yielded intelligence that helped locate Osama bin Laden. The movie acknowledged this solely as a historical fact, without endorsing, much less glorifying, alleged torture. But this mild concession to reality was too much for Hollywood.
Even American Sniper largely sidesteps the big political questions about the war on terror. The film is primarily about the heroism of soldiers who, thrust into battle by larger forces, do their best to protect each other and innocent Iraqis. Clint Eastwood, often described as one of the few prominent right-wingers in Hollywood, opposed the invasion of Iraq and questioned the invasion of Afghanistan.
Even so, the film’s lack of left-wing politics has been treated in some quarters as an unpardonable sin. “The mere act of trying to make a typically Hollywoodian one-note fairy tale set in the middle of the insane moral morass that is/was the Iraq occupation is both dumber and more arrogant than anything George Bush or even Dick Cheney ever tried,” wrote Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi. In other words, any account of Kyle’s personal heroism is somehow invalid unless it is couched in an extraneous political context tarring the war he fought in as immoral.
While this criticism is myopic and unfair, it’s at least preferable to direct attacks on Kyle and service in Iraq. “My uncle [was] killed by [a] sniper in WW2. We were taught snipers were cowards. Will shoot [you] in the back. Snipers aren’t heroes. And invaders [are] worse,” tweeted left-wing documentary filmmaker Michael Moore.
This characterization of Kyle and the American military as evil invaders is directly at odds with what the film portrays. Early on, there’s a scene in which military briefers explain that the enemy the Marines and SEALs are up against is AQI or Al Qaeda in Iraq. The jihadists have come to Iraq from all over the world. And—unlike American soldiers, who operated under strict rules of engagement and worked to protect innocent Iraqis—AQI had no compunction about abusing and killing whoever they saw fit, something the film portrays in wrenching detail.
Still, the briefing scene is remarkable in that it was deemed necessary to explain to American audiences who the enemy is. Surely this is proof enough that the left has succeeded in debasing the war on terror as a fundamentally moral cause.
American Sniper doesn’t make the opposite mistake, either, of depicting a simplistic tale of good versus evil. It shows Kyle making genuinely difficult moral choices—such as killing a child before the boy can throw a grenade into the midst of Marines on patrol. And no one could accuse the film of failing to acknowledge the terrible mental and physical toll war takes on our soldiers.
The left has tried to avoid the anti-American stain it acquired in the Vietnam era by making sure to mouth platitudes about supporting the troops while criticizing the war. The reaction to American Sniper seems to suggest this pose is insincere. Either you’re rooting for Kyle and his fellow soldiers or you’re rooting for AQI. There is no middle ground in American Sniper. The film simply asks audiences to consider the motivations of American soldiers on the ground in Iraq, and then asks whether or not these motivations make them heroic. This may be a difficult question for Michael Moore, but the film and its rapturous audiences answer it with a resounding yes. In a scene taken straight from his autobiography, when Kyle first meets the woman he will marry, she tells him she doesn’t date military men because they are self-centered. “Why would you say I’m self-centered?” Kyle asks, genuinely surprised. “I’d lay down my life for this country.”
It is beyond doubt that Kyle was an exceptional soldier, but he was a far from perfect man. Some of the angry reaction to the film hinges on Kyle’s real-life reputation. While the movie documents his PTSD and other struggles, it leaves out his flights of braggadocio and dishonesty. Navy SEAL turned Minnesota governor turned professional conspiracy theorist Jesse Ventura won a $1.8 million lawsuit against Kyle for claiming that he had punched Ventura. And the campaign to deny American Sniper an Oscar, already getting lots of coverage in the Hollywood trade publications, supposedly reflects Oscar voters’ concern about honoring a man who once described killing as “fun.” (While that is technically accurate, Kyle’s words in his autobiography are more nuanced than that sounds.)
But Kyle’s flaws don’t begin to explain the knee-jerk negative reaction to the film on the left, which goes far beyond the predictable political complaints. Academy voters have been circulating a much-derided New Republic article by a Penn State professor of international affairs who denounced the film in spite of his admission that he had seen only the trailer. The Washington Examiner also reports that the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence had supporters venting about the film on its Facebook page. If Navy SEALs in combat zones can’t legitimately engage in gun violence, who can?
Part of it is simply that the film portrays Kyle as a proud southern, rural, religious, patriotic jock and gun enthusiast who was much more anguished about the people he was unable to save in Iraq than about the 160 confirmed sniper kills that the Navy credits him with. All of these traits are anathema to the left, though nearly all of the great soldiers in American history possessed one or more of them. Leftists simply can’t digest the fact that their own safety is predicated on the willingness to fight of courageous men they openly disdain.
Alas, the outspoken Kyle is not around to defend himself from the more spurious charges. He died in pre-production, when he was shot on a firing range by a soldier with PTSD he was trying to help. Even before the film was released, the Texan’s reputation was such that his funeral had to be held in Cowboys Stadium to accommodate the mourners. Chris Kyle’s nickname in Iraq was “The Legend,” and the film only cements what many, many of his fellow soldiers already knew.
In accomplishing this, American Sniper marks a small turn away from more than a decade of our cultural elites’ witting and unwitting undercutting of the heroism of American soldiers—a turn that may be hard for Hollywood to ignore, given how much money the film is poised to make. The country may still be divided by the politics of the war on terror, but millions of satisfied moviegoers emerging from American Sniper suggest that Americans still broadly agree our country is worth fighting for, if for no other reason than that it still produces men like Chris Kyle.
Mark Hemingway is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
