NY Mag Critic: Eastwood’s Deception Allows US to Mourn Iraq War Soldiers

Thursday on PBS’ “NewsHour,” New York Magazine film critic David Edelstein was very upset with the way Clint Eastwood set up the shots in “American Sniper” because he believes that “extremely dishonest” lack of historical content could somehow lead Americans to believe we fought the Iraq War because of 9/11, not that the movie is just showing the sequence of events in Chris Kyle life.

This was troublesome to Edelstein because, “The movie allows us, allows people to mourn Chris Kyle, to mourn the dead in Iraq, but also to say, this made sense, it made moral, it made cosmic sense.”

Edelstein said, “The way you frame something, context is everything. Clint Eastwood looks at this character Chris Kyle in a vacuum. In a way that I think does a profound disservice to men who died over there, supposedly defending our freedom, as well as the Iraqi civilians, tens if not hundred of thousands, who did as a consequence. The film presents the Iraq war as a natural outgrowth of the attack on 9/11. Chris Kyle sees footage of the Twin Towers fall, he gets married very quickly,  and next thing you know he is in Iraq. And there is no indication by the film that those two things, 9/11 and Iraq, are not connected. There is no historical context whatsoever to the movie.”

“The story of Chris Kyle told in this extremely dishonest way is giving people some idea, ‘yes, we lost him, yes, we lost these incredibly brave soldiers, but there was a reason we were there. There was a reason we had to be there,’ and the movie allows us, allows people to mourn Chris kyle, to mourn the dead in Iraq, but also to say, this made sense, it made moral, it made cosmic sense,” he concluded.

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