As usual, today I am embracing the low standards of writing that blogs are held to and presenting scattershot some of the ideas that were kicking around in my head while watching Fury. This movie has been getting short shrift from critics and I thought it might be nice to get down some of the things I found interesting about it:
For the most part, Fury treats us to the kind of stripped-down and brutalist genre fun so rare in popular cinema today. The defining quality of the combat film, that mix of disgust and exhilaration, is this film’s primary focus, however Fury is unlike any combat film in recent memory. The opening sequence recalls in tone, pacing, and imagery that of Sam Fuller’s The Big Red One and it’s no stretch to say that Brad Pitt’s Sergeant Don “Wardaddy” Collier is certainly a first cousin of Lee Marvin’s Sergeant Possum. But, though both films are otherwise of completely different orders, the two are both shorn clean of the rhetoric and tropes that support the conventional narrative of World War II and present instead a grim vision of war as a reality unto itself.
Fury, of course, is not without its drawbacks and it definitely lacks Big Red One’s eye – or should I say stomach – for the absurd. The central plot is also among the hoariest cliches in the book: Essentially we follow Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman), a recently enlisted typist and certified greenhorn, on his journey to become a “fucking, drinking, killing machine.” Fortunately, the crew is made up of a sterling cast willing and able to shoulder us through the script’s regressive spots: Shia LaBeouf plays Boyd “Bible” Swan and while LeBouf may never be a leading man, he here provides ample proof that he could be among this generation’s greatest actors. This is his most mature and accomplished work to date and his handling of Bible’s desperate contradictions, the warped mixture of the religious and the profane, the urge to kill coexisting with the urge to save, is subtle and complex. Though not for one moment do we doubt that Grady “Coon-Ass” Travis’ antagonism will give way to brotherhood and redemption, Jon Bernthal lends his every scene more credibility than the material should allow for. As played by Michael Pena, Trini “Gordo” Garcia is extremely likable and his characterization hints at a deep reserve of compassion. Brad Pitt as Wardaddy loses himself in the part while retaining every ounce of his charisma. It’s thrilling to see him settle into a role and find the comfort and confidence to under state it. If not for these brave men, the empty interstitial sequences that hew together the real meat of the film might have fully corroded its overall potency.
Behind the camera, writer-director David Ayer’s main strengths are readily on display in his handling of the action. Ayer practices an airtight command of traditional forms, delineating the action with pinpoint precision and making brilliant use of off screen space during the more sedate sequences. A lesser director would have peeled back the steel cocoon of the tank and let the men share the frame. Ayer instead sacrifices a clear picture of the tank’s layout and the relative position of its ward’s to one another so that we can squeeze inside its confines with them. The men are brought together through a rhythmic montage of close-ups that matches the patterns of their operations and their peculiar dynamic. That dynamic far exceeds the bounds of healthy camaraderie and takes the shape of an ad hoc family. Wardaddy is of course the stern, cruel-to-be-kind patriarch of the bloody brood with Gordo and Coon-Ass the rambunctious but dutiful sons. Bible, with his doting insistence on the spiritual salvation of the others and gentle disapproval of their more sinful conduct, is nothing short of motherly. His connection with Wardaddy is likewise of a different order and their exchanges frequently recall those of an old married couple. Ellison is the newborn and his arrival inspires in the family both their resentment and protective instincts in equal measure. It is during the film’s central scene, in which Wardaddy and Ellison calmly invade the apartment of two stricken women after a battle in their city, that this subtext comes to bear fully.
When the three neglected crewmembers discover the other two “playing house” and part of an arrangement of age and gender roles far closer to traditional extra-war relations, they are not upset that the two have withheld the spoils of war. Gordo and Coon-Ass were previously seen cavorting about with another more eager German citizen as if by right and Wardaddy makes it clear that one of them is going to enjoy the younger woman’s company that day no matter what. Instead they feel betrayed on a much deeper level; Wardaddy has in essence cheated on them with another family and outside the enclosure of the tank the boys find their connections threatened. It is here that Ayer sets the cast loose in a decoupage of off-balanced, bifurcated frames, withholding the even equilibrium of place and purpose that they have come to know. The entire sequence is crosshatched with anguish and emotions tangle like ribbons in the wind. It’s nothing short of bracing and is as devastating as any of the films graphic scenes of carnage. Wardaddy here seems to be testing himself to see if he is capable of life with women in a house made of stone and wood. At some point along the way he concludes that he is not and endeavors to savor what will be his last taste of normalcy. This scene again recalls The Big Red One, specifically that film’s passage through an insane asylum. Both sequences set up a distorted funhouse mirror of life outside of war, opening up a pocket of everyday wartime codes and decorum. The men do not rape the women because it is plainly understood by all why they’ve come in the first place. This quiet glimpse into life in war strips away any illusions of civility with its very civility.
With the film’s studious avoidance of backstories or musings about life after war, a custom of the war film, the heroes’ ties to history are cut, further enforcing a sense of eternal war. There is talk throughout of an end, even a victory, but the film’s dark heart of irony is that you wouldn’t know it from the looks of things. This cruel promise, countered by an ever replenishing torrent of SS aggression, is not enough to carry our heroes through. As in Fuller’s film, perhaps the greatest combat film ever made incidentally, the warriors in Fury are fully integrated with the reality of war, however they are poisoned by it to their cores. Pitt’s Wardaddy emerges not as a hero, but as a figure of sadness, worthy of pity. This aspect of the film points it toward the unseen fate of today’s warriors, who if not killed in Iraq or Afghanistan are left unmoored in a world they no longer belong to. However, Fury lacks a real sense of tragedy, a troubling deficiency witnessed in the suicidal/apocalyptic finale. The thrill of this extended battle instead evokes the motivational fantasy of the modern day mass murderer as outlined by the psychiatric community. Henry J. Friedman, one psychiatry professor at Harvard, offered the description of the mass murderer’s psychic relation to killing as “a primary rather than a reactive state,” which could easily describe that of this film’s heroes. In terms of entertainment, it’s a natural fantasy to construct in a time of ambient fear and aggression and part of the film’s appeal is the continual embrace and then violent release of anxiety. There is, sadly, something refreshing and even quaint about ground level bloodshed today when war seems only to screech out of the sky. This film, ostensibly about “The Last Great War,” is a product of the-war-on-terror age. Its obsession with images of ruination makes our own ever-looming abstract terror material, providing a morbid kind of relief.
I’ve made the comparison between this film and The Big Red One many times so far, but Fury is of course a very different beast, the most striking difference being that it lacks what Jonathan Rosenbaum has called Fuller’s “radical humanism.” Fury would be more at home with a certain subspecies that you might call historical exploitation movies, movies that knowingly indulge in the savagery of their milieus (Mandingo comes most readily to mind, but one could also include Fellini’s Satyricon or maybe even last year’s 12 Years a Slave in this category). While the motivations behind this sort of decadence are pretty dubious, for the scrupulous viewer the effect is enlivening. As with drink, one has to know where to draw the line. Imaginative mania fixating on history’s most emblematic instances of suffering and depravity provides viewers with a momentary abreaction from today’s sustained unease (recall Art Speigelman’s comic about his state of mind after the 9/11 attacks as being in a constant state of “waiting for the other shoe to drop”). Ultimately films like this are a way of imagining suffering in the here and now (as opposed to confronting it directly, which paradoxically abstracts it more, c.f. any contemporary western movie about suffering in any country in Africa) and in turn their very unsavoriness helps to divorce their subjects from their fixed positions in the dominant ideological narrative of histories.
Ultimately, Fury comes close to pure nihilism. The interior of the tank is festooned with crosses both of iron and wood and throughout Ayer expresses an admiration for the Nazis that sticks in one’s throat (it also happens to confuse our ingrained conception of Nazis as perfect baddies; there’s no mention of the holocaust and it’s made clear throughout that many Germans were forced into combat just like our heroes). Only it hits the breaks at the last second: Having survived against all odds and taken cover in the mud beneath the tank, Ellison, recently christened with the war-name Machine, is discovered by an enemy soldier of roughly the same age. Machine makes an impotent gesture of surrender and the young Nazi decides to ignore him. And so Machine survives not simply because he killed, but because someone else retained the mercy he chose to abandon. Later on he emerges from the tank, born again of a steel womb amidst a sea of corpses, and is proclaimed a hero.
