Eastwood again shows his true mastery as a director

AMERICAN SNIPER: Has generated strong emotions both for and against its storyline.

EVERY now and again a film comes along that, because of its subject or the quality of its making, generates excitement and strong emotion, allowing viewers to come away with sharply differing views of their shared experience. Long ago, a Japanese movie, Rashomon, explored this trope. It's fitting Clint Eastwood's American Sniper has become a sort of Rorschach Test. What squares that circle is Eastwood's triumphs with Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima telling the two sides, US and Japanese, of the bloody battle for Iwo Jima in 1945.

American Sniper, based on the autobiography of the same name, is the story of Chris Kyle, a US Navy SEAL (SEa, Air, Land commando) who deployed four times to Iraq and, from his singular skill, became the deadliest, most effective sniper in US military history. After returning home to Texas, he was helping other veterans in adjusting to civilian life and was killed by one of them.

That's a brief summary of the events of the movie. The controversy provoked by the movie's telling of the story covers the political spectrum of the viewers. The loudest complaints come from the left. The movie is accused of glorifying violence; some billboards advertising it were defaced with the word "murder." Bill Maher calls Chris Kyle a "psychopath". Michael Moore draws on his own uncle's WWII death to say snipers are really cowards.

On the right, Rupert Murdoch took the time on twitter to praise the movie and slam leftist critics for daring to "trash an American hero".

To my eyes, the movie is none of these things and all of these things. That's part of what makes it great. Unlike the filter of pure black or pure white with which its supporters and detractors see American Sniper, the film as directed by Clint Eastwood, takes the subject matter of war and violence and applies a variegated palate of mood and tone that evokes engagement with the human tragedy that it enfolds, with a nuanced but unblinking look that takes in both sides of that war, American and Iraqi.

Critics of both political sides need reminding that it's a movie. The depiction of Chris Kyle is not to be confused with the actual person, Chris Kyle. His self-description in his autobiography differs considerably from the movie version. The movie grants him a more nuanced, more sympathetic portrait than his own. That may be because of his self-proclaimed ethos as a SEAL in which no quarter is given, none requested. Anywhere. In battle or life. That macho mentality has its own complications which become, without preachment, the source in the movie of Chris Kyle's tragic end.

With the skills of the experienced director that he is, 84-year-old Clint Eastwood has taken the source material and fashioned a more complex portrait of the man. In a departure from the autobiography's seemingly one-dimensional self-portrait of prideful arrogance, the movie shows the impact that continuing violence has on even the strongest of men, the price paid by his closest family members, spouse, parents, children - no matter the rightness or wrongness of the cause of the war.

The film is dispassionate about Iraqis too. The brutality of jihadists is pictured, but so too, however fleetingly, the family of an insurgent sniper, a mirror image of Chris Kyle's.

In American Sniper the death of Chris Kyle is treated with respect, its obsequies true to actual events. In the circumstances leading up to that death we see how Kyle's belief in his own omnipotence leads him, singlehandedly, to undertake the saving of another troubled veteran who would ultimately kill him. Omnipotence, American exceptionalism, was the code Chris Kyle lived by. Clint Eastwood's direction shows us how it hurt him, how it hurt his family, and how it ultimately killed him. All done with the subtlety, the finesse, of a true master.