Message of ‘Sniper’ lies in eye of the beholder

The first time we went to see “American Sniper” - on opening night - it was already clear the movie was a phenomenon.

Long lines had formed at the Movies at Midway. On a Friday night in the middle of January, “Sniper” was sold out. We tried two more times that weekend, thinking it couldn’t be that big. It was. Three strikes and we were out.

We finally saw the movie in Annapolis, Md. In the parking lot a pickup truck had “Screw Jane Fonda” in big letters emblazoned on its tailgate.

The “screw Jane Fonda” crowd, apparently, constitutes a large part of the movie’s fan base. But it’s much broader than that, as is obvious from the movie’s record-shattering ticket sales.

Audiences, reportedly, have been standing up to cheer even in Blue State upper New Jersey. I had the feeling going in that “Sniper” was going to depict Chris Kyle as a real-life Rambo, the Sylvester Stallone creation who retroactively won the Vietnam War for us in America’s movie theaters. I wanted to see what the cheering was all about.

(Spoiler alert: The following will reveal some of what happens in the movie, though I don’t think that makes much difference. There is no plot. It’s mostly a look at one American soldier, whose story is pretty well known.)

There is much to cheer. “Sniper” is a terrific piece of filmmaking. Bradley Cooper wholly embodies the role of sniper Chris Kyle. The battle scenes are intense and terrifying.

But as with many things in America today, “Sniper” has become part of our polarized politics.

The left - I’m speaking generally here - criticizes the movie for being jingoistic and glorifying war.

I read one rant that faulted “Sniper” for not dealing with issues such as: the lack of WMDs, the supposed links with Al Qaeda, the use of torture, etc. - in effect, the whole American experience in Iraq.

I can understand that, in a way, but this is a story about one soldier, not a 13-part Ken Burns documentary.

And unlike the Iraqis, American soldiers are almost uniformly shown to be competent and courageous. Even photogenic.

(Among the few exceptions is Kyle’s brother, who is shown unnerved by the war, which is perfectly understandable.)

But the model soldier image is certainly true of Kyle, a strapping, larger-than-life figure who was equal parts brave and skilled, the most lethal sniper in American history.

The movie has him spouting some nonsense, such as a comment that we were fighting in Iraq so that we didn’t have to fight in the streets of America, but I have no problem with that. He no doubt believed it. He was doing his best to serve his country, which he did with extraordinary dedication.

Harder to take are the references to Iraqis as “savages.” Supposedly, these references are meant only for those Iraqis fighting against American forces, but it doesn’t come across that way.

And yet, despite some drawbacks, I can forgive the movie’s weaknesses because it contains a powerful, perhaps unintended message: “Sniper,” for all its favorable portrayals of individual soldiers, depicts our nation’s military effort in Iraq as one long, nonstop fiasco.

Kyle’s first tour of duty is a nightmarish mishmash of building-to-building battles and sudden death. And so are the second, third and fourth tours.

There are no battles won. There is no progress.

The closest thing to a “victory” is Kyle’s killing of the enemy’s leading sniper, from a distance of more than a mile.

This, apparently, is the payoff, the scene that has audiences standing up to cheer. But what happens next?

Kyle’s remarkable kill shot reveals his rooftop location. And that of his fellow soldiers. Enemy forces swarm toward the building, appearing, in a drone’s-eye view, like so many ants attacking an invader.

What follows is the movie’s most horrifying segment: A sandstorm sweeps in and, for a surprisingly long scene, we see … almost nothing. We hear the sounds of war. Men are fighting and dying. But Americans and Iraqis are enveloped in swirling clouds of sand, hiding friends and foes alike.

The sandstorm works so effectively as a metaphor that director Clint Eastwood either intended it as such or, somehow, a hard truth found its way into his film: In Iraq, American soldiers fought blindly - in this scene, literally blindly - against enemies they could neither see nor understand.

We see brave individual soldiers, but we see nothing accomplished. Instead, we revisit the arithmetic of Vietnam, the body counts. Kyle’s remarkable number of confirmed kills - 160 - is repeated as if that in itself somehow adds up to an American victory.

But it doesn’t. I don’t fully understand either the complaints from the left or the cheers from the right.

For me the message is: We should be far more careful before committing our brave soldiers to foreign wars.