There are the sheep, that is, most of us, defenseless and weak beings; there are the wolves, ready to tear us to pieces and then there are the sheepdogs born to defend the flock from predators.
There is the good, embodied by the sniper Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) and the evil represented by the Islamic terrorists.
Apparently, never before has Clint Eastwood's vision appeared so schematic and Manichean as in American Sniper. Then one thinks about it for a moment and realizes that deep down it has always been like this, the great American director and actor has always hidden the complexity of his thoughts behind an apparent simplicity in which the world appears rigidly divided in two; black and white; right and wrong.
However this time, perhaps due to the patriotic waving of American flags, at least in Italy a ridiculous and anachronistic discussion has opened, fought with reviews, on Eastwood's alleged fascism.
The quality of the film has thus fallen into the background, when it has not been completely forgotten.
Then it will be better to say it loud and clear, American Sniper is, together with The Hurt Locker by Kathryn Bigelow, the best war film of recent times. years. It belongs to that trend of films that depict the horror of conflicts whose relatives are titles such as Apocalypse Now (Coppola) or The Deer Hunter (Cimino) and perhaps its noble father is Stanley Kucrick's Full Metal Jacket.
American Sniper has the slow and controlled breathing of a sniper stationed on a roof, it has the solid and classic cut that only a man who has always loved cinema like Eastwood can have.
He doesn't give in to the handheld camera, everything it's always clear and readable, even when our heroes escape in a sandstorm you always understand what's happening, you know the position of every single character at all times, the spatial sense of this film is simply amazing. American Sniper has practically perfect editing and sound that plunges the viewer into the war as if we were physically there.
The director only needs to frame Kyle's pregnant wife (Sienne Miller) while she is on the phone with her husband who is the victim of a ambush to give us back his painful sense of impotence. It is enough for him to show us Bradley Cooper sitting in his armchair in front of a turned off television while the terrible noises of the front echo in his head to make us understand that our sniper never actually returned home and is still there in the Iraqi desert.
Eastwood is capable of filming a simple barbecue through Kyle's eyes, transforming a quiet family scene into a theater of war.
And when it comes to sinking the blade into the living flesh of the atrocities of every conflict, it does so only with the desperate letter read by the mother of a man who died at the front, it does not rely only on the meeting between two brothers, one of whom is disgusted by what he is experiencing. No, he lets the images speak and makes a boy pick up a rocket launcher while on the roof our hero finally shows the first signs of giving in when faced with the possibility of yet another killing of a child.
Clint Eastwood seems to remind us that evil exists in the world, and it takes the form of those who kill 141 children in Pakistan, kidnap 200 women in Nigeria to enslave them or break into a satirical newspaper to carry out a massacre. These horrors are fought with other atrocities. Of course there are sheep, wolves and sheepdogs; but soldiers even when they fight for the right side are not so different from their enemy. Ultimately Kyle and the Iraqi sniper with whom he competes are just two sides of the same coin, probably slaves to a delusion of omnipotence. The world described by the American director is once again a bad place where war smells like the pool of urine of a man forced to lie down for hours before killing children sent to die as cannon fodder. It is a place where terrorists drill into the heads of innocents, where those who leave for the front will never return home intact and at best will carry those wounds in their minds forever. And maybe even that war that for Eastwood seems to be right makes no sense when your wife reminds you that she, your children, your family are not in a fucking desert on the other side of the globe but are there waiting for you, fragile, helpless and alone. And in the end you even risk ending up killed right outside your home by friendly fire. And even in this case Eastwood reminds us how powerful cinema can be and that the close-up on Siena Miller's face as she closes the front door can easily become the harbinger of the absurd horror that is about to strike her.
They come in mind the words of Love and war by Neil Young who sings, with disarming simplicity, the same things that American Sniper tells, for anyone who has the desire and courage to look beyond the surface of a presupposed reactionary nationalism and go down to hell together to Clint Eastwood.
“I've Seen a lot of young men go to war/And leave a lot of young brides waiting/I've watched them try to explain it to their kids/And I've seen a lot of them failing/They try to tell them and they try to explain/Why daddy won't ever come home again/Daddy won't ever come home/Daddy won't ever come home”.
(I saw many young men go off to war/And leave many young wives waiting/I've seen them try to explain it to their children/And I've seen many of them fail/Try to tell and explain to them/Why Daddy won't come home again/Daddy he won't come home again/Daddy won't come home again).
There is the good, embodied by the sniper Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) and the evil represented by the Islamic terrorists.
Apparently, never before has Clint Eastwood's vision appeared so schematic and Manichean as in American Sniper. Then one thinks about it for a moment and realizes that deep down it has always been like this, the great American director and actor has always hidden the complexity of his thoughts behind an apparent simplicity in which the world appears rigidly divided in two; black and white; right and wrong.
However this time, perhaps due to the patriotic waving of American flags, at least in Italy a ridiculous and anachronistic discussion has opened, fought with reviews, on Eastwood's alleged fascism.
The quality of the film has thus fallen into the background, when it has not been completely forgotten.
Then it will be better to say it loud and clear, American Sniper is, together with The Hurt Locker by Kathryn Bigelow, the best war film of recent times. years. It belongs to that trend of films that depict the horror of conflicts whose relatives are titles such as Apocalypse Now (Coppola) or The Deer Hunter (Cimino) and perhaps its noble father is Stanley Kucrick's Full Metal Jacket.
American Sniper has the slow and controlled breathing of a sniper stationed on a roof, it has the solid and classic cut that only a man who has always loved cinema like Eastwood can have.
He doesn't give in to the handheld camera, everything it's always clear and readable, even when our heroes escape in a sandstorm you always understand what's happening, you know the position of every single character at all times, the spatial sense of this film is simply amazing. American Sniper has practically perfect editing and sound that plunges the viewer into the war as if we were physically there.
The director only needs to frame Kyle's pregnant wife (Sienne Miller) while she is on the phone with her husband who is the victim of a ambush to give us back his painful sense of impotence. It is enough for him to show us Bradley Cooper sitting in his armchair in front of a turned off television while the terrible noises of the front echo in his head to make us understand that our sniper never actually returned home and is still there in the Iraqi desert.
Eastwood is capable of filming a simple barbecue through Kyle's eyes, transforming a quiet family scene into a theater of war.
And when it comes to sinking the blade into the living flesh of the atrocities of every conflict, it does so only with the desperate letter read by the mother of a man who died at the front, it does not rely only on the meeting between two brothers, one of whom is disgusted by what he is experiencing. No, he lets the images speak and makes a boy pick up a rocket launcher while on the roof our hero finally shows the first signs of giving in when faced with the possibility of yet another killing of a child.
Clint Eastwood seems to remind us that evil exists in the world, and it takes the form of those who kill 141 children in Pakistan, kidnap 200 women in Nigeria to enslave them or break into a satirical newspaper to carry out a massacre. These horrors are fought with other atrocities. Of course there are sheep, wolves and sheepdogs; but soldiers even when they fight for the right side are not so different from their enemy. Ultimately Kyle and the Iraqi sniper with whom he competes are just two sides of the same coin, probably slaves to a delusion of omnipotence. The world described by the American director is once again a bad place where war smells like the pool of urine of a man forced to lie down for hours before killing children sent to die as cannon fodder. It is a place where terrorists drill into the heads of innocents, where those who leave for the front will never return home intact and at best will carry those wounds in their minds forever. And maybe even that war that for Eastwood seems to be right makes no sense when your wife reminds you that she, your children, your family are not in a fucking desert on the other side of the globe but are there waiting for you, fragile, helpless and alone. And in the end you even risk ending up killed right outside your home by friendly fire. And even in this case Eastwood reminds us how powerful cinema can be and that the close-up on Siena Miller's face as she closes the front door can easily become the harbinger of the absurd horror that is about to strike her.
They come in mind the words of Love and war by Neil Young who sings, with disarming simplicity, the same things that American Sniper tells, for anyone who has the desire and courage to look beyond the surface of a presupposed reactionary nationalism and go down to hell together to Clint Eastwood.
“I've Seen a lot of young men go to war/And leave a lot of young brides waiting/I've watched them try to explain it to their kids/And I've seen a lot of them failing/They try to tell them and they try to explain/Why daddy won't ever come home again/Daddy won't ever come home/Daddy won't ever come home”.
(I saw many young men go off to war/And leave many young wives waiting/I've seen them try to explain it to their children/And I've seen many of them fail/Try to tell and explain to them/Why Daddy won't come home again/Daddy he won't come home again/Daddy won't come home again).
