When the first trailers for American Sniper, Clint Eastwood’s latest directorial film starring Bradley Cooper (already a HUGE box office success) came out, I was entranced. The trailer connected with me like few recent trailers have. After seeing it, I absolutely, positively wanted to see the film.
Today, shortly after the film’s release, my huge interest in seeing the film has dropped to zero and I no longer have any interest in seeing it. The reason is simple: The book this film was based on has been found to be, to put it kindly, fast and loose with certain facts.
One of the novel’s “facts”, in particular, is author and “American Sniper” Chris Kyle’s assertion (repeated several times by him to the media) that he got into a fight with -and beat up on- Jesse Ventura. This assertion landed Mr. Kyle and, after he was killed, his estate, in court.
Mr. Ventura claimed Mr. Kyle’s story was an outright lie and that this lie defamed his character. Though defamation of character suits are often hard to prove, much less win, Mr. Ventura did both and stands to make a tidy sum from the victory:
The article linked to above mentions other “dubious” claims made by Mr. Kyle in his book. While many, if not most, involve things that happened outside his military life and therefore are hard to verify, I nonetheless completely lost my interest in this work.
Understand, I know almost all biographical films stretch/compress/change the truth to suit their needs. For that matter, I know there have been biographical films that merged several real life people into one character for the sake of streamlining their story.
But at least in these cases the biographical material follows something that actually happened and, one hopes, the makers get the spirit if not the complete and total minute by minute reality of the situations they’re presenting.
I know the whole Jesse Ventura thing is not used in the film and it has been purged from the book but, again, if several untruths are uncovered, does it not make us question how much of what is presented is “real”?
Again, for me, this is a no-brainer. If the film was presented as a fictional work, I’d be there. But as a biography, I’m uncomfortable supporting something that can’t be trusted to be real.