Film Carew: Unbroken, American Sniper

19 January 2015 | 9:49 am | Anthony Carew

Carew ain't buying these two 'Based On A True Story', Oscar-baiting flicks.

Unbroken

“We beat ’em by making it to the end of the war alive,” says Garrett Hedlund, the man-who-knows-things and chief secret-passer at a prisoner-of-war camp to which heroic Jack O’Connell, barely clinging to life as it is, has just been dragged. “That’s how we get our revenge.”

Revenge, here, is a dish best served with grim determination; Unbroken’s inspirational tribute to the Indomitable Will (of America!) worn in its title. Heeding Hedlund’s advice, director Angelina Jolie beats back the heroic uprisings of fantasised wartime dramas, instead chronicling a Based On A True Story tale steeped in slow suffering and clinging-to-life survival.

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It’s an anodyne, Oscar-bait portrayal of the life of Louis Zamperini, who survived 47 days at sea on a life-raft during World War II, only to end up being ‘rescued’ by the Japanese. When out on the open ocean, it’s his wits and discipline that win out over Finn Wittrock’s we’re-gonna-die crazies and the swarming sharks. When in the POW camp, it’s his steely resolve that withstands the sadistic punishment of Miyavi’s tormenting villain. There’s never any doubt, of course, that he’ll make it through to the rousing finale, because otherwise they’d never have made the movie; drama effectively neutered from the first frame.

Director Angelina Jolie beats back the heroic uprisings of fantasised wartime dramas, instead chronicling a Based On A True Story tale steeped in slow suffering.

 

The way O’Connell survives is communicated as a string of clichés that recall motivational speakers, dated sportswriter tropes, or new-age fridge magnets; it, apparently, the power of positive thinking that got him through unimaginable hell. When, in a merry parade of flashbacks, he’s just an Italian-American kid growing up in California, he finds a way out of juvenile delinquency by becoming a distance-runner. His brother (Alex Russell) serves as his coach (his sisters, meanwhile, just stand on the sidelines, literally not saying a thing for the whole film), inspiring him with phrases such as “If you can take it, you can make it!” and “A moment of pain is worth a lifetime of glory!”

These words ring in his ears when he’s fighting off death, and return for a rousing, showstopper, sporting-triumph finale when Miyavi demands, as punishment, that O’Connell holds a railway-sleeper over his head. He does so, defiantly, looking his captor in the eye, unbowed and, um, unbroken to the last; turning cruel Japanese smirk into a horrified wrestling-heel grimace, as if this moment has just tilted the entire field-of-battle. It’s a scene that just stops short of fanfare and flagwaving, a piece of silly symbolism to show that America — USA! USA! USA! — was never going to lose this war.

American Sniper

America! Fuck Yeah! Coming along to save the motherfucking day, here’s Bradley Cooper’s titular soldier: a God-fearin’, gun-totin’, head-crackin’, bronco-ridin’, pussy-nailin’, country-music-lovin’, barb-wire-tattoo-havin’, sunglasses-on-top-of-backward-cap-wearin’ Good Ol’ Boy from Texas. He may be a dud root, a “lousy ranch-hand”, none too bright, and kind of a dick, but this ultra-violent, ultra-macho Navy SEAL sure knows how to shoot them towelheads!

“I don’t know what a Koran look like!” he howls, in protest, when the pen-pushing army higher-ups try and quibble with the vast list of ‘kills’ he’s chalked up from his playing-God perch upon the Fallujah rooftops; diplomacy and bureaucracy the kind of things that The Terrorists just don’t understand. Like the rogue cop of an ’80s action-movie, Coops doesn’t do things by the book (he says “bye book!”). Other people may have questions about the Iraq Invasion, but he has none. “There’s Evil here, we’ve seen it!” he hollers, this justifying the righteous vengeance of All-American justice: shoot first, ask questions later.

American Sniper has been sold as an Oscar-season prestige-picture from Clint Eastwood, about one man wrestling with the burden of bloodshed, a hero for a nation — and a culture — that heroises nothing more than violence. And, as all Based On A True Story tales in the Oscar race are subject to, these days, there’ve been endless thinkpieces about its real-life subject, Chris Kyle, and the limits of cinematic veracity. Yet all those who’ve criticised the film for turning a racist gun-nut into a pin-up patriot have only added to the idea that this is an important movie, one you need an opinion on.

What’s most striking is that American Sniper just isn’t very good, its witless script (by Jason Hall) stringing together an endless run of storytelling clichés.

 

Yet, watching the 34th feature from the 84-year-old filmmaker, what’s most striking isn’t its status as hot-button picture, its loving depiction of a man who filled his autobiography with boastful fabrications, nor Cooper’s thick-necked, ever-drawled performance bringing him to screen. It’s not even its countless scenes that — often depicted through a viewfinder — play out like video-game missions. What’s most striking is that American Sniper just isn’t very good, its witless script (by Jason Hall) stringing together an endless run of storytelling clichés.

There’s a villain named The Butcher (Mido Hamada), who kills one of his own and then hollers “if you talk to them, you die with them!” to underscore his evilness. There’s the Shadow Figure of a mythical Syrian sniper (Sammy Sheik), who’s just like Cooper except wearing a black bandana. There’s the harried wife (Sienna Miller) left back home, who goes from Independent Woman Pt.2 to Barefoot-and-Pregnant to Nagging Bitch (“even when you’re here, you’re not here!”) each time he comes home; this yet another film about an Important Man that makes a token place for the Woman Who Worries About Him.

But the most persistent cliché is the ironic aboutface, in which those characters who dare express hope for the future are swiftly dragged back into the fray. Cooper and Miller are literally in the middle of their wedding ceremony’s first-dance when he gets the call to go to war. Whilst on the phone back home for the “it’s a boy!” conversation about his imminent first-born, his joy is cruelly interrupted — so unexpectedly! — when his troop’re suddenly under attack in a firefight. And when a beta-male (Jake McDorman) starts talking about the engagement-ring he’s bought for his sweetheart back home, he may as well have just said he’s christened his new yacht the Live 4-Ever (American Sniper: the film that demands two McBain references in one review!).

These two-bit characters are little more than supporting players in a drama that, in making doe-eyes at its hero, doesn’t bother to even make him three-dimensional. Cooper plays the kind of gunslinger Eastwood would’ve once: his moral certitude never questioned, his inalienable ‘rightness’ persisting ’til the final frame, when the heroisation turns into a full-blown hagiography. By choosing to tastefully elide its story’s more-conflicting elements (from his mythomania to his strange death), American Sniper plays things paralysingly safe, delivering a bland, dull portrait of a person, and a war, more complex than it ever allows them to be.