Fury

Director: David Ayer
Screenplay: David Ayer
Stars: Brad Pitt (Don “Wardaddy” Collier), Shia LaBeouf (Boyd “Bible” Swan), Logan Lerman (Norman Ellison), Michael Peña (Trini “Gordo” Garcia), Jon Bernthal (Grady “Coon-Ass” Travis), Jim Parrack (Sergeant Binkowski), Brad Henke (Sergeant Davis), Kevin Vance (Sergeant Peterson), Xavier Samuel (Lieutenant Parker), Jason Isaacs (Captain Waggoner), Anamaria Marinca (Irma), Alicia von Rittberg (Emma), Scott Eastwood (Sergeant Miles)
MPAA Rating: R
Year of Release: 2014
Country: U.S.
Fury
FuryDavid Ayer’s brutal and intense Fury, which follows a U.S. Army tank column slogging its way through the heart of Nazi Germany in April of 1945, is a combat film par excellence. According to war historian Gary Freitas, combat movies are dominated by six basic themes—combat hell, unit conflict, war is crazy, combat duels, military command, and the big battle—and Fury hits on every single one of them. It also embodies the visual palette we have come to expect from World War II combat films in the post-Saving Private Ryan (1998) era, although Ayer and cinematographer Roman Vasyanov (who previously collaborated on the much different-looking End of Watch) give it their own spin by playing down the gritty meta-cinematic attention to the medium itself in favor of a queasy alternation between beauty and horror.

Brad Pitt plays Staff Sergeant Don “Wardaddy” Collier, the war-hardened and battle-scarred commander of the titular Sherman M4 tank (the name is scrawled in thick white letters on the tank’s 75mm gun). The film begins just after a massive battle that has cost the life of the tank’s forward machine gunner (we will later see part of his face splattered on the tank’s innards), and its opening image is of a German officer riding slowly across the mud- and blood-strewn battlefield on a gorgeous white steed, a moment of respite that is quickly destroyed when Wardaddy leaps from the turret and stabs him to death. Wardaddy and the remaining crew—gunner Boyd “Bible” Swan (Shia LaBeouf), driver Trini “Gordo” Garcia (Michael Peña), and mechanic Grady “Coon-Ass” Travis (Jon Bernthal)—return to their base camp where they are joined by Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman), a boyish, wet-behind-the-ears recruit just out of basic training who has never even been inside a tank before (he was trained as a typist).

Norman, whose lack of war experience is reflected in his clean lily-white face, does not have a “war name” like the other members of the unit, who have been fighting together for more than three years, and his stark contrast allows Ayer to highlight the film’s central theme: what war does to men—and it ain’t pretty. Pitt may by the above-the-title star, but the film’s narrative belongs to Norman, whose transformation from trembling boy fearful of pulling a trigger to death-dealing soldier gives the story its sense of weight and purpose. The fact that the final shot of Norman suggests trauma, if not psychosis, suggests that Ayer isn’t peddling simple bromides about courage and boys becoming men. War is hell, indeed.

Most of the story follows the tank column as they move deeper and deeper into Germany, met by a German resistance composed primarily of citizens (including children) forced into military service by Hitler’s maniacal desperation and what remains of the fanatical S.S.. The entire country seems to be immersed in mud, as if the war itself has turned the ground into inescapable sticky brown ooze, an apt visual metaphor for the manner in which the men must slog out the final days of the war. There is a lengthy middle sequence where the crew stops in a small village whose resistance easily surrenders, leaving the soldiers with the rare opportunity to let their guard down, drink booze, play music, and seduce the local girls. Wardaddy and Norman take temporary shelter in an apartment occupied by two cousins, Irma (Anamaria Marinca) and Emma (Alicia von Rittberg), who represent the almost-forgotten pleasures of hearth and home. Norman ends up sleeping with Emma, largely at Wardaddy’s insistence, while the older officer is more than content to bathe and shave and eat fried eggs. The idyll is eventually disrupted not by returning German soldiers, but rather the other members of the tank crew, who are drunk and bitter at being left out. Thus, Wardaddy’s attempt to reclaim, if only for a moment, a small slice of pre-war humanity is stamped out by his own men’s rancor, an ugly irony given their years of service together.

Ayer has a special gift for writing and directing male camaraderie (it was the best part of his most recent film, 2012’s uneven End of Watch), and the amusingly profane manner in which the soldiers jab and rib each other carries a sense of grim authenticity. He also uses their down-time jabber as a way of digging into their characters, particularly in an exchange between Bible, who is a man of strong Christian belief, and the others about whether or not Hitler is going to hell. There is interpersonal conflict among these very different men, but they respect and know each other in ways that allow them to function as a singular unit, which is why the sudden introduction of Norman is so discombobulating to them and, in many ways, brings out their worst tendencies.

Thus having checked off combat hell, unit conflict, war is crazy, and military command, all that is left are combat duels and the big battle, both of which dominate the film’s final third. The tank column is ordered to take on several German tanks in order to liberate a battalion of trapped U.S. soldiers, which offers Ayer the opportunity to stage a suspenseful and horrifying duel between the U.S. tanks and the superior German tanks, particularly a Tiger II, which was slower than the U.S. tanks, but more heavily armored and powerfully armed. When the smoke clears, Wardaddy’s tank is the only one standing, which means that it is up to them and them alone to hold a crucial crossroads and keep an advancing battalion of fervent S.S. soldiers from getting through—a final, potentially suicidal mission that allows Ayer to emphasize American grit, determination, and sacrifice.

As that summary might suggest, at times Fury feels a bit too formulaic, as if Ayer jotted down Freitas’s six themes and made sure that each one had its moment of focus. It was already inevitable that the film would draw comparisons to Saving Private Ryan, but Ayer encourages the comparison even further by borrowing several of that film’s plot devices, including the last-minute additional of a newbie soldier not trained for war into an already cohesive unit and a final battle in which said unit must creatively hold a strategic point against a vastly superior enemy. Yet, for all its familiarity, Fury is still frequently powerful in conveying the horrors of war, and the uniqueness of its setting in a tank column, an aspect of World War II that is usually relegated to the background, helps it stand out from other combat films.

Yet, it is ultimately Ayer’s sense of humanity that gives the film its lasting impact. Far from being just a celebration of American blood-and-guts warfare against a clearly evil enemy, Fury gives us real glimpses into the heart of darkness, which here is best embodied in the moments when Wardaddy is alone, away from the eyes of his men, and all but breaks down in tears. In this regard, Pitt’s performance is genuinely affecting, although it sometimes feels too much like the cousin of his drawling Nazi killer in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds (2009). Despite his moniker, Wardaddy is not a one-dimensional killer, but rather a man who has adopted a role and plays it very well, barking orders, maintaining camaraderie, and at times being brutal to the point of risking real inhumanity, as when he forces Norman to shoot a captured German soldier in the back just to give him the experience of doling out death. Yet, in those moments when he is able to shed that horrible armor for just a few minutes, Pitt conveys a man who is terribly frightened, not only of his own possible death, but of what he may have become in keeping himself and the others alive.

Copyright ©2014 James Kendrick

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Overall Rating: (3)




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