American Woman

“American Woman” is perhaps only called “American Woman” because the name of the American Woman in question – Deb (Sienna Miller) – isn’t sufficient to carry the title all on its own, or to convey the sweep of the movie itself, not like, say, Suzanne, which was the title of Katell Quillévéré’s 2013 French drama, a not altogether successful but still frequently compelling film encompassing years in a person’s life rather than a handful of weeks or months. “American Woman” spans years too, though in the company of a character who is less of a troubled free spirit and more reminiscent of Uma Thurman’s flawed if well-meaning “Hysterical Blindness” protagonist, with occasional notes of Amy Ryan’s “Gone Baby Gone” aggression, and not content simply to observe her stasis but how she eventually breaks it and moves on. That means the movie, despite a lived-in setting, with conspicuous rusted aluminum siding and grimy light switches, is less interested in how the place itself correlates to these circumstances than the ongoing dramas in which she becomes mired and tries to overcome.

Deb lives at home with her daughter Bridget (Sky Ferreira) who is, in turn, caring for her own infant son, a familial congestion furthered in how Deb’s sister Katherine (Christina Hendricks) and brother-in-law Terry (Will Sasso) live directly across the street, allowing for several comic confrontations, never more than Deb and Katherine arguing by phone as they glare at one another through their respective front windows. Deb is a livewire, evoked predictably in an affair with a married man but more effectively in Miller’s mere being, treating her sister’s kitchen countertop, say, like a pool table as she dangles her legs over it while slurping beer, and how the character then challenges Katherine’s own adulterous fantasies with Terry right out there in the living room. Not long after, when Bridget doesn’t return home after spending the night with her child’s immature father, Deb rushes by car to confront him, trailed by Terry, brought to life with a humorously but believably frantic air by Sasso, as if he’s a security detail struggling to keep up with his client.

The disappearance of Bridget fuels the movie to come, leading Deb down the dark rabbit hole of depression, culminating in an incredible scene where enraged, drunk and driving, she lets go of the wheel of her car and deliberately crashes, a scene with a more eerie air than horrifying one, as though by releasing the wheel she’s checking out of her own body, improbably bringing to life one of the greatest of all Bruce Springsteen kickers, the one to “Highway 29”, ending on a car crash that might be a dream or might not, as he whispers “I was running – yeah, I was running then I was flying.” And director Jake Scott makes this seem like a dream too, showing her walking away from the wreckage in long shot, nothing heard except the sound of her shoes scraping across the cement, her white costuming emitting the air of a heavenly robe, walking directly toward the camera and then out of its purview, the movie cutting to several years in the future, completely eliding the fallout of the wreck and, as such, rendering it more like a symbolic act, a rebirth. Indeed, from there the movie metamorphoses into the beginning of the rest of Deb’s life, which covers so much ground that frequently “American Woman” feels as if it doesn’t linger enough, particularly where Deb going to school and her eventual full-time job are concerned, the latter concluding in a scene that fails to denote its ostensible triumph because we never see what leads to it.

No, “American Woman” is more interested in the difficult day-to-day details of a poor woman raising a grandson alone, dating and living with an abusive man (Pat Healy, convincingly demonstrating a blown emotional fuse just in the way he seems to twitch at the kitchen table while reading the paper) in a relationship where the transactional necessity is painfully laid bare, Miller’s riotous, incredulous laugh when Deb is asked if she intends to marry this loser belying that painful truth before the chararacter verbally cops to it. If it speaks to Deb’s plight, it also speaks to Miller’s performance, one morphing from angrily obtuse to levelheaded, where in each scene she gradually cools off and paints in a little more mindfulness, so that her character’s arc rings true no matter what, like a late movie marriage that despite overly conspicuous plotting gains credence in both its swift union and eventual dissolution simply from Miller’s solid disposition. In fact, the scene where Deb calmly confronts her spouse rhymes with a later scene, one bringing the preeminent plot point of her missing daughter to a close. There is a cosmic meaningless in each one, which might have rendered cheap cynicism if Miller had not already made implicit Deb slowly infusing her life with meaning, dealing with the unbelievable by finding the wherewithal to believe in herself.

American Sniper

"American Sniper" opens with a moment of intensely rendered drama when Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper), Navy SEAL extraordinaire, is stricken with an immense heat-of-the-battle decision, to shoot or not to shoot a mother and child potentially on the verge of taking the lives of his comrades-in-fatigues. The film brings us right up to "Yes!" or "No!" and then......flashes back to the beginning of his story. This is a traditional thriller device and one that seems tailor-made to trigger a tidy all-American action-adventure. After all, the real-life Chris Kyle, as the ads ceaselessly bill, was the most lethal sniper in United States military history, one with 160 confirmed kills that directly correlated to an $80,000 bounty put on his head by Iraqi enemies. He was nicknamed "The Legend" on account of his exploits. Yet just as that nickname is employed onscreen not as mere militaristic braggadocio but as a skewering of mythologizing in the midst of events still taking place, the opening sequence plays as a purposeful feint toward a traditional thriller before opting for something more illuminatingly introspective.

Clint Eastwood directed the film and while there are several notable battle sequences set in Iraq, these are never the film's strict focus. He, in tandem with writer James Dean Hall (adapting from Kyle's book of the same name), transform "American Sniper" into a patient character study, one that traverses almost nauseatingly familiar ground while nonetheless enlightening specifically because of its resistance to elucidating the war-going experience. The 84 year old auteur's preferred leisurely un-auteurist sorta style allows the theoretically rote introductory moments of Kyle's boyhood with a father demanding ferocious obedience giving way to a pre-military existence as a rodeo rider, a "cowboy" as if he were a latter day John Wayne Green Beret, to effectively encompass a structured life giving way to one of aimlessness.

It is not until he heeds Uncle Sam's request in the wake of the twin bombing of African US embassies in 1998 (a sly dig at the reactionary mentality) that his life gains genuine traction, both within the naval ranks and on the homefront, where he eventually marries Taya (Sienna Miller). Their meet cute at a bar is a fairly moldy concept, yet still rings true in how the actress believably communicates in but a few moments her search for something tangible in a wandering life. Kyle recognizes and embraces it. And then 9/11 happens and he goes to war.

"American Sniper" deftly portrays how the military both builds Kyle up in the very real brotherhood he forms and tears him down in the psychological toils of war. It does not, however, resort to blatant speechifying to make these points, simply letting events accumulate until he is internally hurtling out of control. Nor does it seek to openly politicize. The only examination of the Iraq war from a national perspective is a palpably naive one wherein Kyle wants to serve and protect America because it's America and America is The Greatest Country In The World. Slowly, quietly, that viewpoint is stripped away, and, perhaps without him making the conscious realization, he finds himself accepting extended duty to protect and avenge the friends he has made more than to defend the honor of his country. "They won't understand that it's about the men next to you, and that's it," as Eric Bana said in the exemplary "Black Hawk Down", though, to its immense credit, "American Sniper" doesn't even need to say it.

“Tell me why you do it. I want to understand.” This is what Taya demands of Chris in a late sequence because she wants to know why he keeps sending himself off to harm’s way in spite of his family, and why he is so shut off and closed down from the world around him. And despite her putting the question to him so pointedly, he doesn’t give an answer. Not because he doesn’t have an answer, necessarily, but because he can’t articulate it. What can you possibly say to get someone who hasn’t lived through it to understand it? And this marks "American Sniper" as an outlier. It's not quite a recruiting film but it’s also not quite anti-war. It says everything by saying nothing. War movies, often rendered by those who have never been to war, so often seek to denounce it or exalt it or explain it. Eastwood has no intention of doing any of these things.

Cooper is a revelation in the lead role. Under the shepherding of David O. Russell he tapped into a distinct and marvelously entertaining manic energy for back-to-back powerhouse turns in "Silver Linings Playbook" and "American Hustle." Here, however, he takes that manic energy and purposely represses it so that by the end he is practically bubbling over with a mental strain that he cannot (not will not - cannot) define. In one harrowing scene he has arrived home from war only to avoid his family and take up residence at a barstool. Taya calls him. He admits where he is. She expresses distress. Why wouldn't he just come home. "I guess," he replies, "I just needed a minute." And in that single line reading and in that single bit of actorly affectation, Cooper conveys the toll a serious military life takes. Though we empathize with it, we can't understand it. "What is it about?" I sense people craving to ask in the wake of this film. That's just the thing - we'll never really know what it's about.