American Sniper - Best Picture and Five Others

I deliberately avoided reading anything about the controversy surrounding American Sniper because I didn't want it to effect my viewing of the film. The film was good, but not great. Some scenes soared with drama, tension and emotional impact, other aspects of the film fell completely flat for me.

The acting was really great throughout, from the big names to the small players. The only exception to this was one obviously plastic doll standing in for a real baby. Did anyone else notice this? That doll could not act its way out of a paper bag! Poor Bradley Cooper was gently shaking it for all he was worth and could not get it to look real. I guess the infant actor had colic that day.

The sound was really well done from the very beginning of the film. Sometimes it was gritty, realistic, "put you in the middle of war" sound and sometimes it was the hyper real sound of the breaths and heart beats of the sniper himself, but it was all effective. I'm not surprised that this film was nominated in both sound categories.

The film tracked two arcs of its title character, also known as Chris Kyle. On the one hand we watched how the perfect soldier is bred and created; what scars him, what motivates him and how he sees the world. He is a very successful soldier and we get a good idea of why. On the other hand, we follow his progression deeper into PTSD and see the tension building in a home life that might have started out a little shaky to begin with. Unfortunately, in tackling both of these, I felt that neither arc was very successfully resolved. In reading about the controversy after I saw it, I can see why the writers had a tough time resolving the PTSD part of his life. I guess I would argue that they shouldn't have weighted so much of their story toward an arc that didn't resolve in a satisfactory way. It felt like they split the movie down the middle and lost some of its potential power.

Similarly, the movie was sometimes realistic, sometimes stylized but mostly felt like it spent too much time hovering in the middle. If it would have committed more wholly to one or the other, maybe I would have been swept up in it more. As it was, I liked it just fine, but it wasn't anywhere near the best picture of the year.