Bradley Cooper stars as Chris Kyle and let me tell you, there is no ‘Hangover’ here. Instead Cooper portrays a mean, lean, shooting machine.
As a young boy, training to hunt in the Texan woods with his father, he had a natural trigger finger. And he was raised to see things in the light of the Bible….the sheep, the sheepdog and the wolf. The innocent vs. the evil.
Then he grows up, trains as a Navy Seal in the Iraq War, marries his wife (Sienna Miller, who finally btw, proves she can act,) before heading off to war where he’s more certain of life in combat than life back home with pregnancies and white picket fences. And like many past Clint Eastwood directed films, this one is no different, with the guilt and ambivalence of violence and ultimately death. (Remember Unforgiven? Gran Torino? True Crime?) Cooper is a softie in a tough world, especially when it involves shooting a child, even if the child is a mini terrorist with a grenade in hand.
The film if divided into four tours. Cooper comes home and then goes off to war again, where his spirit (previously decomposing) seems to soar at its best. But at the final, final, hurdle of war vs. family it’s quite clear why he can’t function at home. He’s like a man on the outside of a snow globe looking into the magic of normalcy…all that he can’t handle…all that a war has robbed him of.
I’m not sure Cooper is a great actor but in this he is way out of his range just as he teased us with that fact in his performance in Beyond the Pines.
Eastwood might be getting older, but his ability to command a screen of actors (preferably when he’s not ‘in’ the film) is outstanding. He doesn’t waste space, screen time, or words…instead putting us in the eye of the camera and the soul of Cooper….we feel his pain. It’s Zero Dark Thirty of 2014. ♔ ♕ ♚ 1/2