Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1

Costner's Folly, Chapter 2 ("Nobody Knows Anything")

or

Going For the Fences
 

You've got to hand it to Kevin Costner. He takes chances. He's parlayed his television success on "Yellowstone" to make a movie he's been dreaming of for a couple of decades, in times both fallow and flush, cast it with a steady stream of great character actors who've never passed onto the A-list, split it into two chapters (although hopefully there will be more) and released the first one—in which various story-lines do not intersect—as a 3-hour set-up...the sum of which would spell box-office poison to a movie-going audience that wants its product pre-digested and easily grasped like fast-food.

 

And who can blame him? He's done it before. When he was making it, Dances with Wolves was being derided as "Costner's Folly" for making a Western when they weren't fashionable, for it's extensive location shooting, for the supposed grandiosity of writing, directing, producing and starring in it, for it's planned use of sub-titles, and for its cost overruns. 

 

But, as William Goldman wrote, nobody in Hollywood knows anything. Dances with Wolves became a box-office smash, its elegaic, and unconventionally seditious, story becoming a hit with audiences and garnering the Best Picture Oscar, beating out Goodfellas (which some may argue was a mistake, but, to my mind, really wasn't).

So, here's "Coster's Folly" Chapter Two, the ungainly titled Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1, with a story by Mark Kasdan (who co-wrote Silverado, a favorite of mine), Costner and Jon Baird, photographed by J. Michael Muro, who shot Costner's lovely Open Range.

 

And it's great. Simply great.

For a 3-hour movie, it sails right by, packed to the sprockets with detail, period and story-wise, never seeming to waste a frame in telling three...four? five?...stories about a plot of land in the San Pedro Valley in the American west that may—or may not —be available for homesteading, and the people who are attracted to the promise of it (whether it is true or not) and the people already living there who take it for what it is. 

 

There are the first white settlers, there to survey and parcel, but as they're alone in the wilderness and, unbeknownst to them, surveying Apache hunting grounds, they soon fall victim to a war party. Their graves are the first semi-permanent structures of Horizon. They won't be the last.

But, the pattern will remain the same. By 1863, there is a well-established colony on the site, across the river from those three original graves. They, too, are attacked by Apache, leaving a limited number of survivors: some, like Frances Kittridge (Sienna Miller) and her daughter, Elizabeth (Georgia MacPhail) will take shelter at nearby Fort Gallant; others, like the boy who rode to the fort to get help, Russell (Etienne Kellici) form a hunting party to track down the Apache who burned down the encampment.

That attack has caused a dispute between the leader of the war party, Pionsenay (Owen Crow Shoe) and the leader Tuayeseh (Gregory Cruz), resulting in the younger man splitting from the tribe, taking one of Tuayeseh's sons with him. 

In Montana, James Sykes (Charles Halford) is shot by Lucy (Jena Malone), who takes her son David and flees for the Wyoming territory. Sykes' sons Junior (Jon Beavers) and Caleb (Jamie Campbell Bower) are sent to find her and the child. They catch up with her where she now goes by the name Ellen, married to hopeful lands-trader Walter Childs and living with a local prostitute Marybelle (Abbey Lee). When the Sykes boys show up, there is a confrontation between the vicious Caleb and saddle-tramp Hayes Ellison (Costner), a potential customer of Marybelle's. She and Hayes and the child escape town to avoid repercussions of the murder.

Also heading for Horizon is a wagon train, moving along the Santa Fe Trail, under the auspices of Matthew Van Weyden (Luke Wilson), who is having trouble keeping the eclectic group of settlers (including a naive British couple and the family of Frances Kittridge's late husband) of the mind that, although they may be headed for a paradise, they're not there yet, and water and team-spirit are in short supply in a desert.

In the mix are interesting characters, like the leaders of the Army detachment at Ft. Gallant, who are straight out of John Ford's Cavalry films: Lt. Trent Gephart (Sam Worthington, the most effective performance I've seen of his), who's a pragmatic soldier and would just as soon have settlers somewhere else and the "indigenous" (as he calls them) left to their land to keep the peace, a sentiment acknowledged but considered historically unrealistic by Gallant's leader, Col. Albert Houghton (Danny Huston) and his sergeant major, Thomas Riordan (Michael Rooker, in a slightly less garrulous version of the parts Victor McLaglan played in Ford films). One likes these people and you get the feeling everybody's doing the best they can under the conditions and the inevitability of time.

That's a novel's worth of people and a lot of stories and one suspects everybody's going to converge in Horizon (the town itself will probably end up being the focus of the series), their characters already established and with ensuing complications in the offing—Costner has previews of the next chapter at the end of this one and my appetite for it is whetted.

Despite the obvious nods towards Ford, Horizon: an American Saga, so far, feels more in the vein of the sprawling How the West was Won, but, in character, more like "Lonesome Dove", where individuals weave in and out of the fabric of the narrative, and sometimes—as in life—are never to be seen again in an indifferent Universe, lost in the stream of History. Costner may love his Westerns, but he acknowledges there's less romanticism to it when the survival rate hovers around 50%.

It was in Ford's film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, where a reporter states "This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." Ford's career peeled back veneers of western legend varnish in his films and in his later work stripped off more layers of his own earlier myth-making. Costner goes even farther, taking into account the grubbier myths of Leone and Peckinpah (and Eastwood) with his hard-scrabble porous towns in need of light and cleaning and extermination. He goes a step further by putting back all the practicalities of the settler experience that Ford cut out—the burying of the dead, the scarcity of water, the bugs and critters, the difficulty of killing a man with ball-shot, the necessity of self-sustainment by farming, the ritual of hard work, more important community matters than tea-dances and ceremonies.

If there's anything more to wish for, for me, it would be that there's more of it (despite others quibbling about length). A couple transition sequences seem to have been excised just to speed things along that might not have added much but may have smoothed a passage of time.

It's still early days, but one gets the sense that Costner will be making a point that the beauty of the West that we admire may not be just a matter of the dirt and stone carved by time and tide but also foundationed by the bones of those who walked before us. 

Stardust (2007)

Written at the time of the film's release...

"Getting killed by pirates...heart eaten by a witch...meet Victoria--I can't seem to decide which is worse!"

Matthew Vaughn's film of Stardust is so far removed from his last film, Layer Cake, that it would take a Babylon Candle to bridge the two (Don't know what a "Babylon Candle" is? Then you'll have to see the film. You should anyway). 

Layer Cake (an updated aside—it's the film where, suddenly, Daniel Craig, managed to emerge from behind the furniture into a eye-catching starring performance) was a whooping, swooping kitchen-sink-and-Porsche's story of drug-dealing in contemporary London. And while some of the stylistic touches are the same for Stardust, the story couldn't be more different. For instead of modern-day Britain, he is spinning his camera through Neil Gaiman's Faerie-Land.

Gaiman's reach is all things mythical, from the twee to the atrocious--across the stars, underground, beyond the pale and underneath your fingernails. He borrows from all sources, and puts them through his own personal salad-shooter and spits them out with his own dressing. In his work you'll find echoes of Shakespeare, Marlowe and Milton, G.K. Chesterton and Jorge Luis Borges and the Brothers Grimm, Greek mythology and Roman gods, History and Urban Legend, The Arabian Nights and the Book of the Dead, The Bible and the DC/Marvel Multiverses. 

I've been reading Gaiman with delight (no pun intended) for years, starting with his "Sandman" saga, which dragged on for maybe a dozen more issues than necessary because he had so many stories he wanted to get to, but I also love his "Violent Cases," and much of his book-work. It is with some trepidation that one watches his forays into film--Jon Peters owns the film-rights to "Sandman," for instance, and Gaiman wrote the English translation for Princess Mononoke, and worked on "Mirrormask," and there's talk of filming "Good Omens," the book he co-wrote with Terry Pratchett.* That's scary talk. For what it's done to the works of Alan Moore, Hollywood looks like a gold-plated abortion clinic, and one wonders if they could do any justice to Gaiman's work. Even to attempt to film his "Signal to Noise" would be to destroy it.

Stardust makes the transition fairly well, though it eliminates the faeries and sprites that populate Gaiman's world like smoke, dust and flotsam do in Ridley Scott's (they also serve as little "Rosencrantzes" and "Guildensterns"). They throw in a sock-o finale, and the film has none of the delicacy of Charles Vess' illustrations from the graphic novel that Gaiman expanded to book-length. In fact, it has the sensibility several refinements up from Monty Python-design. But it does retain Gaiman's special form of "myth-busting," the wink-and-a-nod to the "real" world that suffused The Princess Bride, but without the Borcht Belt cinched around its waist.

What's interesting is how Paramount is selling it...or not selling it, as the case may be. Looking at the poster, you'd think it was one of the endless string of pre-teen or teen fantasy novels adaptations that are filling the Previews, or as reverent as Chronicles of Narnia, when nothing could be further from the truth, (but there are enough spinning helicopter shots of big landscapes to reassure the Suits that it has a "Lord of the Rings" quality). It's frequently hilarious in surprising and snarky ways, especially in the casting. 

Michelle Pfeiffer may not be the best at holding an accent, but her comic timing, and willingness to play against her looks is delightful. Robert DeNiro makes an entrance and you worry that he's been put in the wrong movie, but then he comes through with flying colors. Peter O'Toole does wonders with his limited screen-time as the Lion-King of a family of blue-bloods, and Rupert Everett shows up long enough to tweak his image hilariously. It's a fun, fine, un-gooey fairy tale that charms and delights. It's not doing well at the theaters, so do yourself a favor and go. Don't wait for Paramount to get their act together to convince you.

* "Good Omens" was made into a TV Mini-series in 2019 on Amazon Prime.

The Lost City of Z

In Memory Yet Green
or
"What's a Heaven For?"

James Gray's new film, The Lost City of Z (I prefer to call it The Lost City of Zed, as it is articulated in the film), is not just "Based on a True Story (that cliche tag-line of so many movies these days), but "Based on the Incredible True Story." And it's about bloody time. Its protagonist, Col. Percival Fawcett (played quite effectively, if opaquely by Charlie Hunnam*) has been fictionalized enough times, being the inspiration for Challenger of A. Conan Doyle's "The Lost World," Quatermain of H. R. Haggard's "King Solomon's Mines," and their modern descendant of antiquities, Jones of Indiana. The original should get his due, because his story truly is incredible, filled with hardships and danger, both foreign and domestic, and proved a challenge to the complacent way of thinking about what makes a civilization among the class-conscious societies of England at the time. Fawcett was a forward thinker who became lost in the past. 

But it wasn't always so. When we first encounter Fawcett, he is long trek from legendary. A "lifer" in the British Army at the turn of the century, he has been passed over for promotion on numerous occasions—not through any dereliction of duty, not because he is untalented, he is, in fact, one of the best and boldest of his company. He overhears the reason after bagging the stag in an elk hunt held for the Archduke Ferdinand*—"He's been rather unfortunate in his choice of ancestors," as one of the stuffy dignitaries puts it. Dad was a bit of a drunk in his military career, so the sins of the father are visited upon the son. Class, and the lack of it, are married in one unfortunate summation. Geez, no wonder there's an America.

Skilled, he may be, and respectable, he certainly is, his career nevertheless is stalled, and so he accepts an assignment he's recommended for with the Royal Geographical Society (headed by former "Star Wars" Emperor Ian McDiarmid)—to map unexplored borders of the Amazon rain-forest and maybe, just maybe, find its source.

It is hazardous duty to be sure, from flora, fauna, disease, and natives, who have never advanced past the tribal stage (but, then, has anybody?) and might not take kindly to strangers. The Army offers him nothing and so he agrees, knowing full well it will be a journey of years; his wife Nina (Sienna Miller) knows the frustration of her husband and, rather reluctantly, agrees. Fawcett bids farewll to wife and child (with one on the way), taking with him Colonel Henry Costin (Robert Pattinson, unrecognizable and good enough to forgive anything he's done in the past), whose knowledge of the rain-forest proves essential, as well as a native guide Tadjui (Pedro Coello), picked up after a visit to a rubber plantation, run by the Baron De Gondoriz (Franco Nero), who warns him of the exploration parties that have not returned, but Fawcett forges ahead, determined to prove his mettle in the "uncivilized" world, a land without prejudice.

Tadjui tells him of an ancient city in the Amazonian jungle, a golden city with a large population, a city that Fawcett begins to call "Zed," and on his first mission, he finds pieces of pottery and figurines, artifacts that prove to him that, though there may not be a city of gold, there is one with a civilization that does more than hunt with spears, but is capable of art and practical tools. He finds the source of the river, but in their excitement at their find, Tadjui makes his escape.

Fawcett is welcomed back to England a hero and his accomplishments are lauded, but his theories about "the lost city of Zed" and that the natives of what he calls "Amazonia" are far more advanced than had been previously thought are controversial and met with scoffs and derision. It isn't long before he is enticed to go back to prove his contentions that the native populations have a sophistication and civilized organization that threatens the British imperialist image of savages.

There is also some controversy at home. His son Jack resents his time away, and his "equal wife" quickly realizes how far that goes when she wants to accompany him on his next trip—she has found an artifact in public records that alludes to a fabulous city somewhere in the Amazon. He tells her she is just not capable of it and steadfastly refuses to take her.

But, he does allow a renowned biologist James Murray (Angus McFadyen), late of Shackleton's Nimrod expedition and wants to reclaim his past glories on this latest endeavour that has so impressed the world. He should have taken his wife, instead, as Murray is quite ill-prepared to handle the tropics.

In a scene straight out of Apocalypse Now, the boatload of explorers sees another boat aground precariously on shore. by the time they notice a man aboard and that he's dead, the air becomes lethal with arrows and spears, too suddenly for some on the boat to avoid being killed. But Fawcett is determined to find the source of the attack and wades ashore, arms outstretched. One last arrow pierces his notebook and he stares at it in wonder, not just in that he was spared, but at the precision it took to hit and not go all the way through to kill him.

Fawcett walks up the bank. Soon, one warrior appears amidst the brush (which director Gray, like so many directors before him, treats as not merely a backdrop, but as one of the characters), then, another shows as back-up, then another. Soon, a half-dozen natives have emerged, and one goes back to report what has happened, while the others maintain eye contact. And with that, Fawcett achieves acceptance and discovers the tribe has a sophisticated defense mechanism to maintain its security. Despite his party's casualties, his trust is rewarded in kind.

A good thing, too, as the members of the tribe turns out to be cannibals, something that thoroughly repulses the biologist Murray. Fawcett and the veterans of the previous party know enough to keep quiet, lest they go from being the guests for dinner to being the main course. But, Murray, who has slowed the party down, and has been known to steal rations from others in the group. A knee wound leaves him raving and in need of medical attention, so the Fawcett thinks it best for all concerned if they send Murray packing to seek attention from the last known encampment on their journey as they go their own way. This will come back to haunt them when they return to England after they've found finished their expedition.

But, they've found no Zed—evidence of sophisticated farming and medicine, yes. But no golden city.

And, then World War I happens, even if doesn't turn out to be The War to End All Expeditions.

It is an "incredible true story." And all parties involved in The Lost City of Z do right by it. Filming in the jungle—the genuine jungle—is a logistical nightmare for a filming crew, but Gray is a fastidious director, but not so much so that he doesn't provide the telling grace note that moves the story from mere communication to the poetic. Because you cannot tell a story like Fawcett's without exploring how the quest becomes more than the goal, but about the journey itself, not only of the landscape, but also of the mind. Because the trek can have a profound effect on the traveler...as it did with T.E. Lawrence or Meriwether Lewis. What began for Fawcett as a way to gain acceptance transcended it beyond class, beyond family, beyond self...to the point where he became a man apart...unto himself. It is only appropriate...if unfortunate...that his last trip to find the lost city—one he took with his son—he never returned from...as if he disappeared into his own dream.

An incredible story, yes. A true story, as far as we have knowledge of.

But one could also say legendary, if it weren't for the mystery of the man at the center who lets life and love go by for a dream, thus making the story more..."proverbial." More cautionary. More universal. Do not lose your way. Do not lose your soul.

And in the end, the man and his goal became one. Fawcett's body was never found, nor has his lost city.

Fawcett in the jungle c. 1908

* Hunnam is much more appropriate for the role than the two who dropped out: Brad Pitt (whose Plan B Productions is behind the film) and Benedict Cumberbatch, who dropped out due to conflicts filming Dr. Strange) 

** I hear your arched eyebrows raise, history-buffs....

Live By Night

The Demon Rum
or
Neither Blood Nor Faith

The opposite of love isn't hate; the opposite of love is indifference. I didn't love Ben Affleck's new film Live By Night; I didn't hate it, either. But it did make me indifferent.

That's an odd reaction because I loved, and was impressed by, Affleck's previous adaptation of a Dennis Lehane novel, Gone Baby Gone (which was also his directorial debut and started him on an impressive director career, which culminated in his winning the Oscar for directing Argo—which I found the weakest of his films, until this). One should be careful of high expectations as they just set you up for disappointment, which could be a sub-text for the entire film, if it wasn't such an exemplar of the sentiment.

When we start, Joseph Coughlin (Affleck in the lead) is a veteran of the first World War, one of the "lost generation," who come back to his native Boston to take up a career as a small-time robber. A raid on a high-stakes poker game sets him for a lot of scrutiny both from the Boston police and by a top hoodlum, Albert White (Robert Glenister). Seems that Joe has an "inside man" on the poker heist, that being White's woman, Emma Gould (Sienna Miller). What drives them together one can hardly say. She's pretty, okay, but unconventional more than attractive, and that must be the attraction, because Coughlin is in love, or as his policeman father (Brendan Gleeson) says, "Crazy isn't love."

Maybe that's it. She's everything he's rebelling against—his father, the law, his enemies. Maybe after coming home from the war, he must think he has some magic touch, but he's proven wrong, when after a bank robbery gone haywire, he gets beat up by White and his goons and Emma Gould is murdered, and as the robbery has ended up killing three policeman in a wild chase, his father won't touch him, either (except to maybe lean on the local Inspector to let Joe off with a light prison sentence).

When Joseph gets out of prison, he swears revenge on White and signs on with the Pescatore mob—something he'd previously been unwilling to do, not considering himself a "gangster"—but Pescatore has a burgeoning rum smuggling interest in Tampa, Florida that White is muscling in on, and, working for the Italian, Coughlin becomes an enforcer for the mob, swatting away encumberments that might keep the activities from making a profit, like the local chapter of the Klan, or non-negotiating politicians and the local chief of police (Chris Cooper). Things come easily to Joe, who starts to relax just long enough to start a romance with one of his rum partners (Zoe Saldana), as he tries to thread a more moral path while being a mob-boss, an exercise that ultimately will prove an exercise in futility. What, this guy's never seen a gangster movie?

And it is the same old gangster movie, unfortunately. The only thing that separates Joe Coughlin from the rest of the clans of movie-mobsters is that he is less insular, less xenophobic than most gangsters. Traditionally, in movies, the mobs, the gangs, have always been substitutes for family, Coughlin's estrangement from his Poppa-Cop being the film's catalyst. Whereas most of these films draw lines along racial, religious, or ethnic divides, Live By Night's Coughlin is an equal-opportunity bag-man. Associates are associates by experience, not by blood or faith. So, Joe may be somewhat forward-thinking, grant him that, by fighting such types as Klansmen and opportunistic religious zealots, all the while providing the population with distractions in vice, the impact of which we are not given the opportunity to see.

He might have good intentions, but he's still a criminal, or (as one character puts it) "just a bandit in a suit." Does it really make any difference what his liberal social views are, when they have no basis in any moral fabric than the kind you find in greenbacks?

One feels no kinship with the character, though his heart may be steering him in the right places, his hands are not. I've always found the "mobster with a heart of gold" trope to be absurd, bordering on the laughable, like Al Capone being the defacto Mayor of Chicago. Live By Night carries through-line, straight-faced throughout, without any of the rough or cock-eyed perspective of a creator who might have a more secure moral foot-hold. It wants us to feel sympathy for the devil, but only because they might be less repugnant than his enemies. Even the most glorifying of the mobster-pics, The Godfather, knew enough that, though the story of Michael Corleone is a tragedy, he is still a monster, someone whom we might sympathize with, but never cherish.

Affleck, as a director, has been attracted to moral quandries with no easy answers and tough choices. But Live By Night is such a simplistic, wrong-headed film that he seems to have lost his way in the morally murky Florida swamp. Where before he had a sure directorial hand, here his action sequences are hodge-podge and confusing, especially in a fire-fight in a genteel hotel, where you just have trouble distinguishing the "good guys" from the "bad guys" (if there are any). And though he's gotten good work from his cast and his eclectic director of photography, the eclectic Robert Richardson, too often it's at the expense of "window-dressing," pretty pictures that look impressive, like a shining wax apple, but with none of the pulp, "the juice," or anything at its core.

After The Godfather, Part II, Francis Ford Coppola for many years resisted Paramount's increasing entreaties to make a third film giving as the reason "gangsters are boring." I've rarely seen a boring gangster film, although I have seen bad gangster movies (Gangster Squad and Mulholland Falls, for instance). Martin Scorsese has managed to keep gangster films that both deconstruct, and find new life and depth, in the genre. But, Affleck, even with his past expertise at bringing life to Lehane and his themes, cannot bring anything enlightening to this. 

Yeah, I'm with Coppola on this one: gangsters are pretty damned boring.

American Sniper

I Am Legend
or
Number One with a Bullet

Clint Eastwood's second film of 2014 (mind you, he'll be 85 in May, and his earlier film was the musical, Jersey Boys) is the adaptation of Iraq war vet Chris Kyle's memoir American Sniper, which details Kyle's four tours in Iraq and his subsequent struggles with PTSD. It's as far afield as a movie about The Four Seasons can be and shows off the versatility of Eastwood's directing career, even as the man sticks close to his guns in the way he work, economically and bluntly (both David O. Russell and Steven Spielberg were attached to direct before budget constraints and studio nerves over box-office engineered the more frugal Eastwood to be hired).

Since its opening weekend, which garnered a lot of money at the box-office—far more than any other film about the Iraq war—there's been a lot of heat from both the left and the right, but not an awful lot of light. Frankly, the commentary has been pretty dumb, and neither side has been able to think outside of their own agendas. But, Eastwood tends to do that—he can't be pigeon-holed by either side (unless someone isn't listening or is merely cherry-picking what they want to hear), so he'll take flack from the right for Million Dollar Baby and J Edgar (and Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima) and from the left for Heartbreak Ridge and Gran Torino. So, he must be doing something correctly. Certainly, he isn't playing it safe. Or playing to the crowd.

Bradley Cooper plays Kyle—he bought the book, shepherded it through production and did considerable research and physical bulking up for the role. From the beginning, Kyle is a man of few words, laconic and spare with his feelings. He sees a task and does it, no questions asked, no second thoughts—as Jimmy Stewart used to say in movies "A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do...so he does it." His call to action is when he sees a televised news report on the attacks on U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. "Look what they've done to us."

Right from the opening, American Sniper sets up the conundrum: "Shoot, or not shoot." Kyle is perched on a rooftop, scoping the surroundings—a marine convoy is coming down the street, and he sees an Iraqi native on a balcony talking on his cell-phone. We've seen this before in Kathern Bigelow's The Hurt Locker. Is he reporting troop movements or is he talking to his girlfriend? Shoot or don't shoot? The issue is compounded when moments later, a woman and boy walk out of the same building and approach the convoy. Kyle takes aim, trying to put together what's likely—she's not swinging her arms, she must be carrying something...but what? Shoot or don't shoot? There's not enough evidence to suggest that she isn't merely a civilian walking down the street in a bombed-out, occupied section of town with troops coming down the street in her direction, so he doesn't shoot, and his spotter tells him that if he makes the wrong decision, he'll be hung out to dry for killing civilians.

Back in 1987, Stanley Kubrick made Full Metal Jacket, about a morally righteous man (Matthew Modine), who still goes down the road of professional soldier until the point where he kills a sniper—a woman—after she has shot up his troop. It shows the dehumanizing aspect of war—if one is playing it cynically and smart (and doesn't particularly want to die) you end up doing things completely apart from who you are...just to survive. There is no room for sentimentality, as it's said in the film "It is a hard heart that kills." And in a scenario of live or die, it is kill or be killed. And as the line goes in Inherent Vice: "Don't worry. Thinking comes later."

The film back-tracks to Kyle's childhood, of hunting, of being told there are three types of people in the world—sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs. Sheep believe there is no evil in the world, wolves are predators and believe evil does not exist in their actions, but sheepdogs are aggressive and brave and protect the balance from evil. The movie goes through Kyle's attempts at being a rodeo rider, sees that footage and joins the Navy to become a SEAL. During training, he meets Taya (Sienna Miller), courts her, wins her, and on their wedding day, he gets word that he is being deployed to Iraq.

Back to the rooftop. Kyle eyes the woman and boy. She uncovers a metallic cylinder. There is no question. He fires. She drops. The boy picks up the grenade and runs towards the convoy. Kyle shoots and he collapses, the cylinder clanking to the ground. "Nice shooting, Tex!" says his scout. "Get the fuck off me" he says through grit teeth (the language is appropriately salty).

Kyle is constantly reminded of the people he's killed, but he's stoic about it. "I'm prepared to answer for every life I've taken. I just think about the ones I couldn't save." As bodies fall around marines from unseen vantage points, his reputation among the troops grows. He becomes "the legend," unseen but present in the damage done. A guardian angel for those on patrol, he's a devil for the Al Qaeda warlords. But it's not enough. His rifle-scope also lets him see Marines being carried out of action, wounded, missing limbs. So, he abandons the rooftops and joins patrols as point man in house-to-house searches, throwing himself in harm's way.

He's never not there; although the Marines consider him "the over-watch," in Iraq he has a bounty on his head, particularly from a "player on the other side" named Mustafa (Sammy Sheik...no, really), a former Olympic marksman who travels the rooftops, setting up blinds the same way Kyle does, unseen, but his presence known only by the damage done. Even at home, Kyle is not safe, watching the war on TV, seeing it continue without him, the casualties mounting, and withdrawing from his wife and children. He's compelled to go on a second tour, then a third, then a fourth.  

By the end of his fourth tour, he has to go to a bar before he goes home, more in fear of that than going into the field. The accumulation of the day-to-day combat leads to a crippling PTSD...that he can't talk about. A measured, reluctant "mm-hmm" is all he'll offer as acknowledgment. Like the earlier The Hurt Locker, this segment may be tough for audiences to understand, but for anyone with a loved one or colleague who has gone through red-zones, whether in combat or from some other deep trauma, it is heart-breaking and Cooper nicely underplays, not being obvious about it, but keeping it buried deep underneath his already established portrayal of Kyle, blunting it, restraining it, only betraying it in a dullness in the eyes.

In his own book, Kyle made some claims that could not be confirmed, and the screenplay takes many, many liberties on its own—"Mustafa" was a rumor, and although there was a bounty on snipers, it was not just Kyle who was singled out, and there is an Iraqi war-lord mentioned named "The Butcher" that never existed that is there to illustrate the pressures Iraqi citizens have with the non-American, local, insurgents. One should not have to be reminded that this is a movie (and I'd be hard-pressed to name any dramatic presentation that followed everything to the letter*), dialogue is invented, actors are cast, etc. To expect absolute truth is disingenuous whatever ideology one clings to for comfort. Even the line that haunts me ("Look what they've done to us"—indeed) is a fabrication—Kyle didn't join the Navy due to those attacks—it was always his intention, but injuries from his rodeo days kept him from serving, until the Navy reversed its decision.

It is not gospel (and is gospel "gospel?"). But, as an illustration of the soldier's march and the perilous aftermath having to deal with "what must be done," it's as eloquent as any I've seen on the subject of wartime PTSD, and as much as official circles have spent decades denying it, that is very much real, and the further legacy of the horrors of war...and why it had better be pretty damned important—and provable—to incur the damage that such arcane tribalism inflicts on everyone.

* Given that, I've had a long-in-the-works review of  Jesse James (paired with The Return of Frank James) that is such a bold-faced white-wash from beginning to end that I should probably re-write the thing with less of a slant on its veracity (practically none) and more on what's there. I can be accused of expecting the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. That's not merely being disingenuous, it's being pretty damned stupid.