We Don't Need Another Hero: My Problem with "American Sniper"

I love a good awards-season controversy as much as the next Oscar buff. It can perk up a dull January/February, and create the illusion that movies or actors or living legends or whatever/whoever is central to the controversy are more interesting than they are.

That said, controversy is most effective when it's warranted, and frankly, I don't get all the bickering over American Sniper. Sure, parts of it could almost double as propaganda for the right to bear arms, but as far as the Iraq War that is central to the story is concerned, Sniper's political stance concerning West vs. the Middle East is less obvious than, says, Argo's was two years ago. So there's that.

And this: I don't see Sniper as being pro- or anti-Muslim, nor necessarily pro-war or anti-war. If I had to go with one side, though, I'd say it leans closer to being against military bloodshed. The movie easily could have been subtitled War Is Hell on the Homefront, Too, which certainly would not have been a celebration of it.

But getting back to Sniper's depiction of Muslims, is it inherently anti-Muslim because its story is told from an American's point of view? The movie is, after all, called American Sniper, so I went in expecting a Western focus. While I'll cheerfully concede that Eastwood could have painted the Iraqis with less broad strokes, I see that more as a result of his shallow directorial style than as a political statement or a personal agenda.

Perhaps someday someone will make a movie about the Iraq War from the other side's point of view. What a fascinating movie that would be. In the meantime, we have this one. Being that it was based on the title character's memoir, I'd say Eastwood told the story he was supposed to tell.

That doesn't mean he justifies the killing of 160 to 255 Iraqis. To say that telling the story through Kyle's eyes is an indictment of Muslims and tantamount to racism and xenophobia is like saying that if any screenwriter is ever brave enough to write a movie about slavery from a slave owner's point of view, that movie would automatically be racist.

Calm down, people. The Talented Mr. Ripley, one of my favorite books, had a killer as its protagonist and practically dared you to identify with him. That didn't mean its author, Patricia Highsmith, condoned murder. She was simply telling a story -- one that made for such a disturbing read because it so effectively got inside its main character's head and helped you understand his motivation and, dare I say, identify with it to a certain extent.

That is precisely what doesn't happen with American Sniper, and for me, that's its greatest flaw. It's not that Chris Kyle killed 160 to 255 people. That's a documented fact. There's no way to get around that while making a movie about him. What I never got from the movie was why. Was it his unwavering patriotism? Was he just protecting his fellow Navy SEALS and Marine comrades? Was he a racist and xenophobe who simply hated Iraqis? (His reaction to the little boy who picked up the gun and then put it back down suggests that it wasn't so simple.) Was he just doing his job?

After two hours and 13 minutes, I felt like I knew Kyle's story, but I still didn't really know the man. The movie fails to go deep into his head. We have scenes of his wife telling him how he feels, scenes of him staring off into space, a scene of him attacking a dog in a PTSD fit, but once it was all over, I didn't feel as if I knew anything about Chris Kyle other than what he did.

Why did he seem to love his work so much until he didn't? Why was he such an excellent marksman? Why did killing seem to come so easily to him? Clint Eastwood is the king of wrapping up plot points in neat little bows, but I'm going to need more than a scene with Kyle's father warning him to be neither the wolf nor the sheep but rather the protector to understand what shaped him.

While I enjoyed this biopic more than I did The Theory of Everything, I had a similar problem with both movies. Their depictions of complex, complicated men are too simplistic and borderline hagiographic, which, in Sniper's case, is particularly confusing because Bradley Cooper specializes in playing flawed, complicated men. He does the material he's given justice, but it's far from an "Oh, wow!" performance.

Just in case we don't get that Chris Kyle is considered a hero by pretty much everyone he encounters when they stop just short of bowing down to him, we have that scene with Jonathan Groff, sounding a lot like Patrick, the character he plays on Looking, telling Kyle's son that his dad is an icon. By vaguely announcing, just before the end credits roll, that Kyle was killed shortly after the final scene by a veteran he was trying to help, the movie paints a halo over his epitaph.
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As I watched the scene with Groff, I almost wanted Kyle to recognize him as Groff's gay TV character and pull his little boy away. It would have been the most homophobic move ever, but at least I would have felt like I was looking at a real person and not just a variation on the strong, silent Dirty Harry archetype that Clint Eastwood has spent so much of his career glorifying.

The big difference: Dirty Harry never actually existed. Chris Kyle did.

Why I Wanna Be Bad

"I'm gonna f*** it up again
I'm gonna do another detour
Unpave my path
And if you wanna make sense
What you looking at me for
I'm no good at math
And when I find my way back,
The fact is I just may stay, or I may not
I've acquired quite a taste
For a well-made mistake"
--Fiona Apple, "A Mistake"

I think it started sometime around 1996 when I first read The Talented Mr. Ripley. I was on holiday in Prague, and I was so taken by the main character, Tom Ripley, despite his many misdeeds, that I started to assume his identity, if only in my mind. What if I were able to go out and do such terrible things and still be sympathetic?

One night I went out with Andrew and Mark, two new British friends I'd met on the holiday, and introduced myself to people as Tom Ripley. At the end of the night when I wrote down my phone number for a German tourist, he glanced at the paper, looked at me, and said, "But I thought your name was Tom." Mr. Ripley would never have made such a gaffe!

It's no wonder. Acting has never been my forte. But I've often heard it said by folks in that profession that there's nothing quite like playing the villain. Anyone can gain 50 pounds, make themselves ugly, or pretend to be gay for a role, but there's no greater onscreen challenge than being funny and making a bad guy (or girl) human.

In this sense, General Hospital, my favorite daytime soap now that there are only four left, is perhaps one of television's best training grounds for thespians. It's often laugh-out-loud funny, and there are few characters on the show who haven't been tainted by truly bad behavior. At the moment, there are three and a half rapists on the canvas (I say three and a half because I'm still not 100 percent convinced that Joe Scully Jr. raped Connie Falconeri), all of them more or less sympathetic, if not completely reformed. In fact, the greatest soap opera love story ever told -- the one between GH's Luke and Laura -- began on the night he raped her in 1979 to the sensual trumpet melody of Herb Alpert's No. 1 hit "Rise." I still remember being glued to the TV screen while watching that scene unfold almost exactly 33 years ago.

Elsewhere on the show, you've got heroines with checkered pasts. Some are self-centered narcissists who've been married to the mob (Carly Jacks and Tracy Quartermaine, who's my all-time favorite soap character anyway), one is the legal representative for the mob and a mob boss's baby mommy with at least two deaths weighing not-so-heavily on her conscience (Alexis Davis), another is a former grifter who once watched an innocent baby be kidnapped and presumed dead (Alexis's daughter Sam Morgan), and yet another is a bad-girl-turned-good who recently revisited the dark side long enough to switch DNA test results (Sam's romantic nemesis Elizabeth Webber). Somehow, though, I always find myself rooting for each of them, even when they're pitted against each other.

And did I mention the mob presence in GH's fictional town of Port Charles, New York? It's run by the two stars of the show (neither of whom, shockingly, is a rapist), the aforementioned boss Sonny Corinthos and his No. 1 enforcer, Jason Morgan, GH's romantic centerpiece for at least the last decade who will exit brooding on October 22 when his portrayer Steve Burton airs for the final time. Meanwhile, Sonny's son Michael once killed his stepmother and shot Sonny's girlfriend (by accident). For me, they all represent the show's weakest link -- not because I have anything against killers, but because mob families bore me.

Then, of course, there's Todd Manning, played to the embraceable hilt by Daytime Emmy winner Roger Howarth. He's a rapist who is not above murder and kidnapping to get what he wants. He killed his own mother in the final months of One Life to Live (to be fair, she was a heartless B who deserved a much more slow and painful execution), and he thinks he killed his twin brother Victor Lord Jr., who is actually still alive, as revealed on the OLTL finale in January.

Since arriving on GH earlier this year, Todd has bragged about getting off with murdering his sibling by pleading insanity, he's helped orchestrate a baby switch, he's been an accomplice in the kidnapping of Luke Spencer, and he's been the partner-in-crime of Johnny Zacchara (a mobster and a rapist who's guilty of patricide and killing Todd's granddaughter and the boyfriend of Todd's daughter Starr) and Heather Webber, the most lovable lunatic/psychopath in the history of soaps.

Sometimes I watch GH, and I don't know whom to hate/root for. There are just so many options. It's like reading The Talented Mr. Ripley five times a week, with a cast full of Tom's. It's nowhere near as artful as Patricia Highsmith's masterpiece but just bad enough to satisfy the bad boy who lives inside of me somewhere barely underneath the surface.

"A Mistake" Fiona Apple

My Most Embarrassing Moment: The Day I Accosted Woody Harrelson in a Public Toilet

It probably wasn't my smartest move ever.

The year was 1990, and I was having lunch with a group of friends at Cafe Garden across the street from the University of Florida campus in Gainesville. It was one of those lazy Saturday afternoons when your expectations are low. But isn't that always when the unexpected happens? After we ordered, who should walk through the door but Woody Harrelson, then best known as the Emmy-winning star of the popular sitcom Cheers.

I was a UF senior, and less than a year away from moving to New York City, where I would begin my professional journalism career at People magazine, interviewing famous musicians and other assorted celebrities. "Guys, look," I said, pointing at the door. "Woody Harrelson just walked in!"

After a few minutes of gaping and gawking, we watched him head into the men's room. Now, I thought, is my chance. After a few minutes of debate -- Should I stay or should I go... to the bathroom? -- I decided to follow him. When I opened the door, he was washing his hands. He looked up at me and smiled.

"Hey, Woody," I said breezily, as if we were old friends. It's a technique that would serve me well in the future, when meeting people like Reba McEntire, Faith Hill and Marie Osmond, who thought I must have been an old friend whose name she couldn't quite place when I ran up to her and exclaimed, "Hey, Marie!" backstage at the American Music Awards. She hugged me and promptly introduced me to her dad and her sons.

Harrelson was just as cordial, though there was no family for me to meet. I asked what he was doing in Gainesville, Florida, of all places. He explained that he was shooting a movie called Doc Hollywood nearby, with Michael J. Fox. Now I was really starstruck, and not just because of the company he was keeping. He was as cute in person as he was on TV, and his piercing blue eyes made it hard for me to stop staring into them.

It was an awkward moment for sure, but I had to keep the conversation going.

"So what's it like to work with Kirstie Alley? I love her."

It was one of the dumbest questions I'd ever ask a famous person, but Harrelson pulled his weight, keeping up his side of the exchange. If he thought it was weird that I was asking about his Cheers costar instead of him, he never let on. After a few more awkward minutes, I let him go.

I thought back on our brief encounter last night while I was watching Rampart, Harrelson's new film, for which he's receiving well-deserved Oscar buzz. Charming and talented as he was 21 years ago, who would have thought that he would go on to have such a successful screen career (minus that 1999-to-2003 drought) that includes two Oscar nominations so far?

The funny thing is, had I had my first Woody Harrelson encounter after watching his performance in Rampart, I would have been too terrified to do what I did that Saturday morning back in 1990. The film's poster describes his character as "the most corrupt cop you've ever seen on screen," and that description isn't too far off. Since I'm not a big fan of movie violence, I was hesitant to stick it into the DVD player after sitting through the gore-free The Ides of March (which, despite some glaring flaws, I loved, especially the Ryan Gosling vs. George Clooney staredown near the end).

But with such an interesting cast -- which included Anne Heche, Cynthia Nixon, Robin Wright and Sigourney Weaver, all actress I adore but never would have expected to see in the same film -- I couldn't resist. I enjoyed the movie, but what made me more uncomfortable than the occasional violence was how appealing Harrelson and his character were to me. He was a dirty murderous cop, but I found myself rooting for him anyway. I wanted him to clean up his act and earn redemption. I wanted him to mend his ways and his relationship with his daughters and ex-wives (sisters, played by Heche and Nixon, in a bit of casting genius).

It was like reading The Talented Mr. Ripley all over again. That was the first time I fell for a killer. None of the film adaptations -- Purple Noon, nor the 1999 film version starring Matt Damon as Tom Ripley -- had the same effect on me. But there's something about Harrelson's crooked smile and piercing blue eyes that are just as alluring now as they were 21 years ago in that Gainesville bathroom. No wonder he was able to get Wright, Nixon, Heche and the fantastic, uncredited Audra McDonald into bed!

If it were 1997 or thereabout, the Best Actor Oscar would be his to lose.