Fury
Directed by David Ayer
Three and One Half Stars
By Rollan Schott
The centerpiece of David Ayer's bleak and gritty "Fury" is a quiet and mysterious scene in a small German apartment that endures much longer than we initially think it might. In 1945, as the Allied forces had turned the tide in WWII and begun to advance deep in to Hitler's Germany, Don Collier (Brad Pitt) the grizzled commander of a beleaguered tank battalion, and Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman), the terrified rookie in his outfit, find two German women holed up in their home after the Americans seize a small German outpost. Like these women, we have no idea what sinister designs these rough men might have on them.
What happens in that apartment is a revelation, and a surprising and tragic one. "Fury" contains many surprises, but this is one of those great scenes. Most good films contain that one scene that reveals the entire function of the movie in microcosm. That Mr. Ayer composed his such scene at a dining room table is unexpected. This is a harsh and beautiful film. It tells us that the great sacrifice of the soldier is not of flesh but of humanity, that to uncover the capacity to kill, these men must endeavor to abandon what they know of morality and dignity and succumb to a devolved animal instinct that makes them ugly and unpleasant.
This idea is insisted upon relentlessly. The men in Collier's tank, with the name "Fury" scrawled along the cannon, are both weakened and hardened by their days in the war. Here is Bible (Shia LaBeouf), manning the cannon, who insists beyond all reason that God is protecting the tank, a man of new testament gentility engaged in a very old testament righteousness. And here is the blooddrunk Gordo (Michael Pena) and the crazed Coon-Ass (Jon Berthal), for whom the war is a manic absurdist theater. If comedy is merely tragedy that happens to other people, Coon-Ass is the disaffecting cipher of those who are unable to appreciate their complicity in these horrors. As Gordo observes to Norman after his first battle, "Your eyes see it, but your head can't make sense of it."
And then, yes, here is Norman, a paper pusher who arrives at the group almost certainly through a clerical error, and must become a killer of men immediately, lest he risk the lives of his comrades. "Don't get to close to anybody", he is warned, and in a moment of deflating irony is forced to peel the face of his predecessor from his new seat in the bowels of the Fury. It is the transformation of Norman, at once a coming of age and a descent into madness, that forms the emotional core of "Fury".
Aside from Norman, these men exist in a vaccuum. We are not told what they did before the war. We know nothing of their families or their desires. They are killers of Nazis, bound by the moment, responsive only to the most immediate threat. This is a gruesome film. Bodies are obliterated, dismembered, popped like cysts beneath tank treads, yet Mr. Ayer regards this with almost no sense of circumstance. It is woven seemlessly into the tapestry of war, kept at arms length as by the men amongst it.
No small part of the effect comes from the music. The score by Steven Price seems to exist outside of the action. It swells in restrained crescendos and notes of aching beauty, but it seems superficial, a routine response to images that should overwhelm us with feeling, but instead ring hollow. There is no genuine beauty here.
"Fury" climaxes with a battle at a crossroads where the lone, immobilized Fury and its five crew members attempt to fight off a battalion of hundreds of SS troops. Collier elects to stay even though they had time to flee, and fight a battle they have no realistic chance of winning. Why does he do this? Because it is what he does. As Poiccard tells us in Godard's "Breathless" (1960), "Informers inform, burglars burgle, muderers murder, lovers love." Collier, like his comrades, is reduced to a utility, incapable of desiring anything other than the execution of his duties. He is a good soldier, and that is a terrible thing.
"Fury" seeks no noble or moral justification for the heroic deeds of the men at its center, but sees those deeds as a sad extension of the grotesque contortions of human nature that found them in that tank, on that road, in the first place. This is not one of the great war movies, but it is a genuine and courageous one. As we saw in the apartment, between five men who are together but in very different places, and two women who are powerless to do anything but fear, sometimes we learn a great deal about ourselves, without knowing what that lesson might have been, or even that we learned anything at all. And all to often we pay a terrible price for wisdom.
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