While still retaining the base entertainments of the war genre, David Ayer’s
WW2 flick “Fury” tackles topics of humanity, masculinity, ideology and national
loyalty in a dense and deliberate way. It’s an ensemble buddy war drama in the
tradition of “The Dirty Dozen”—or maybe even more testosterone-driven westerns
such as “Rio Bravo” and especially “The Wild Bunch”—but with a leftist
post-Vietnam, post-9/11 introspective sensibility that questions the overall
effectiveness of war as a means to an end and ponders the long-lasting impact
on the individual soldiers caught up in its hell. Sometimes wallowing in its
moral greys and other times manipulating the audience with the visceral
simplicities of black and white, the mix of these two ideological outlooks, and
the way Ayre attempts to balance them within the narrative, is a subtextual war
of its own.
This story of a team of tank fighters, who, at the tail end of the Second World
War, are moving through the devastated villages of Germany, begins when one
member is brutally killed and a new soldier is brought in to replace him; a 19
year old typist named Norman (Logan Lerman), who’s ripped from his cozy job and
thrown into the rainy, blood stained fields of battle. There he meets the
steadfast leader Don Collier (Brad Pitt), the teams’ bible thumping gunman Boyd
Swan (Shia LaBeouf ), Grady Travis (Jon Bernthal), a troubled southerner who
probably takes too much glee in his murderous duties, and a Mexican-American
soldier named Trini Garcia (Michael Pena) who’s already showing early signs of
PTSD. It’s clear from the first few missions that Norman is in way over his
head, and, having just lost one of their own, rolling into some of the most
dangerous tank battles against the Nazi’s near-impervious Panzers, the rest of
team doesn’t have the patience for him to get comfortable with the idea of taking
a human life.
Ayer’s follow-up to his 2012 found-footage cop-drama “End of Watch” builds on
the themes of brotherhood and masculinity in a more cohesive and more
pessimistic way. The extremely tense and explicitly violent war scenes are
spaced appropriately by character building moments of reflexivity, letting the
audience get to know and sympathize with this group of men who’re trying their
hardest to keep their emotional vulnerability bottled in. However, though
the performances are sensitively portrayed and the battle scenes are
competently staged and shot, when their tank rolls over the dead bodies of
their enemies and they poke their heads out of their mobile shelter to shoot
down the newly appointed Nazi youth, some of whom are younger than our movie’s
hero, the nobility of nationalistic bravery becomes difficult to identify or
enjoy. And sometimes--if I’m giving the movie the full benefit of the doubt--that’s
the point.
In one key scene, after a village battle has ended, Lerman and Pitt’s
characters enter the home of two German sisters, and after Pitt’s Collier pulls
them out of hiding, visibly frightened and shaking with fear, he offers them
both eggs and breakfast as a peace offering. Though this moment breathes
with steady directorial observation, as the story progresses, what follows on
their path is a series of increasingly depressing and devastating act of
violence until the movie’s final showdown between the out-manned, out-gunned
Fury and a sizable SS militia.
Does “Fury” want to be a think piece about the lowest depths of depravity world
governments have forced on the innocent minds of naïve recruits looking to
serve their country, who then have to numb their souls in order to toe the
line, or does it want to be a rousing coming of age story about having your
blinders removed and being forced to see what evil looks like by figuring out
your place in opposition against it? It’s difficult to tell
sometimes, resulting in a technically accomplished action-drama that tests your
moral barometer as you’re often unsure if you want to cheer along or wince in
disgust.
Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Oct-2014
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