Roll Credits: 13 Brilliant Movie Endings

5) American Sniper (2014)

The ending of American Sniper, perhaps more than any other movie on this list, can only be understood through the film’s beginnings, the stages even before Warner Brothers – having passed on the idea three times already – agreed with Bradley Cooper that he could produce a film about US Navy Seal sniper Chris Kyle.

Jason Hall, the movie’s screenwriter, had heard about Kyle through a friend who knew him. Interested in writing a script from Kyle’s autobiography, American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History, Hall decided that the most effective thing to do would be to talk to Kyle himself. So Hall packed himself off down to Texas, where Kyle and a group of his friends were on a hunting trip.

Intimidated and completely out of his depth among this group of over fifty US Rangers, Hall eventually found himself being dragged into a fight by one of said Rangers. Having done some wrestling in high school, Hall managed to get the Ranger into a headlock (!!), and threw him on the ground. Kyle’s attention – and respect – was duly won, and he agreed to talk with Hall about the script. Hall recalls how haunted Kyle seemed, how the war was still so evident in his eyes and manner. But when his wife Taya and their children came to visit, Hall saw Kyle’s face change. That, he says, is the moment that he knew there was a real story here.

But it wasn’t to be the story that Hall was imagining. After ten months of getting to know Chris and his family, Hall was finally ready to turn in the script to Warner Brothers. On the 1^st February, 2013, Hall gave in the draft, and texted Kyle to let him know. Kyle replied, “Hope your work’s good dude. Good luck.” Hall then rang Cooper to tell him that the script had been submitted.

The following morning, Hall received a call from a Ranger friend of Kyle’s, informing him that Kyle had been shot earlier that day on a shooting range in Texas, where he and fellow veteran Chad Littlefield – who was also shot– had been working with a younger veteran suffering from PTSD. Both men died instantly.

For a week, Hall, Cooper and director Clint Eastwood were at a loss. Warner Brothers had only agreed to make the movie if Cooper was in the role of Kyle, and Cooper had already started his gruelling physical, vocal, and military equipment training. Cooper never met Kyle in person (he didn’t have the chance) but he had been studying him constantly on video, absorbing his mannerisms, voice, and characteristics: He describes how on the morning Kyle died, he woke up “knowing that Chris was gone.” “I just knew it,” Cooper recalls, “he was just gone from me…I could just feel it – that he wasn’t there.”

Then, seven days after Kyle’s death, Taya called Hall. She told him that this film was going to be an enormous part of how the children remembered their father, and that they had “better do it right.” Hall redrafted the entire script, and he, Cooper and Eastwood went immediately to Texas to meet with Taya and the children. What had started as a straight forward movie project was now something else entirely. The filmmakers had to develop a film that would be honest to Kyle both as a person – as a husband and father – and as a military man, and that would draw attention to his life while now also honouring his death.

Along with Taya, Cooper watched hour after hour of home videos of Chris – at Thanksgivings, Christmases and birthdays – and listened to Kyle’s voice on recordings throughout his daily six hour work outs. Clint Eastwood brought to the project his own deft ability to convey grit and emotional or situational intensity without overworking a scene. But eventually, as hard as the American Sniper cast and crew worked to bring Kyle back to life throughout the film, there was no better justice they could give to the end of Kyle’s story than to show the actual reality.

Rather then, than including a death scene, and a recreation of the funeral – which could easily have come across in poor taste –the film ends on February 2nd, 2013, the day that Kyle left for the shooting range, showing him to be a man who has finally made it back to his home and family.

Only one, simple, on-screen subtitle outlines what happened later on that day. The screen then cuts to the real footage of Kyle’s funeral. This shows thousands upon thousands of people lining the road as the funeral procession moves past, Kyle’s coffin adorned with the flag of the country that he worked so hard to protect and paid such a high price for. We see the coffin again – this time studded with hundreds of Navy Seal badges, that comrades of the dead would push into the coffin lids as a mark of honour and respect– and the thousands more people that attended his memorial service at the stadium of his beloved Cowboys.

In some ways, using this footage was an excellent direction move – wise, sensitive and profound. But ultimately, it involved no direction at all: Eastwood, Cooper, and Hall created a brilliant representation of this complicated man – but, as they rightly recognized, the end of his story tells itself.