Fury

David Ayer’s Fury serves as a reminder that there is no subject better suited to the cinematic form than World War II.  A seemingly inexhaustible number of stories, styles, genres, and themes exist within the broad category of WWII pictures, as if movies were enlisted immediately and forevermore in helping people understand what had happened.  With its giant, global scope and scale, WWII reached and overtook the world in an almost all-encompassing way that no other single cataclysm of the modern age has before or since.  And the War occurred at what was arguably the peak of the movies’ influence over culture—not just American culture, but also that of Germany, France, England, and many other nations involved in this crisis of civilization. Considering the combined cinematic output of all these countries, it would take many lifetimes to watch all the films made during and about WWII, which include propaganda and documentary films of the period; historical and revisionist features made decades later; classical narratives colored and reimagined by the experience of the War; and original fictional accounts of wartime activities on the battlefield, in the skies, on and below the seas, and back at the home front of over a dozen individual countries.

Of the literally tens of thousands of WWII movies made about the men who did the actual fighting, few focus on tank warfare, which was a critical aspect of the conflict. Tanks feature prominently in some major historical war pictures like The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel (1951), The Battle of the Bulge (1965), Patton (1970), and The Big Red One (1980), but you can count on one hand the WWII films that are actually set in a tank. (I can only think of three: the Humphrey Bogart picture Sahara (1943), the little-know British film The Misfit Brigade (1987), and the Russian “Moby Dick as Tank” picture White Tiger (2012). The minimal attention given to this major aspect of the War is perhaps unsurprising. Tank combat lacks the dashing romance and cinematic sweep of air warfare, depicted in hundreds of films about pilots and airmen. It can’t come close to creating the mystery and suspense of submarine pictures, with their chilling quality of hunting in the dark surrounded by a cold, uninhabitable, undersea environment. And the small scale of a tank crew provides less opportunity for the sociological explorations of class, race, and ethnicity mined from so many true-life and fictional stories about Marine platoons, army grunts, and navy seamen. Tank movies have another limiting obstacle: the uncomfortable fact that American tanks were not as advanced or powerful as their German counterparts, leading to fewer tales of allied victories involving these battle wagons. Fury capitalizes on this last aspect.

The film takes place at the tail end of World War II, as the fighting draws to a close and the allies make their final push into Nazi Germany. But any sense of triumph eludes the battle-weary men of the 2nd Armored Division. They have seen most of their fellow men die all around them, and they know a lot more death will come before the conflict is over. Therefore these soldiers, who by all rights should be feeling a hopeful sense of victory and completion, have an air of defeat and finality hanging over them. Brad Pitt plays the commander of a Sherman tank called "Fury." Four of his five-man crew served alongside him from the early North African campaign, through the D-Day landings at Normandy, through the push across the European Theater. Logan Lerman plays a green, recently enlisted clerk who joins the crew when their bow gunner is killed. Like most of us in the audience, Lerman’s character knows nothing about tanks and hasn’t experienced the brutal realities of combat.

With almost no exposition, the film does a superb job of conveying to the audience how a Sherman tank works and the various roles its five crewmen perform. The comradery of the veterans, their antagonism towards the new, inexperienced recruit, and Pitt’s depiction of a wise warrior--compassionate and civilized on one hand; savagely brutal on the other--come across as authentic and credible. Fury is not without some war movie clichés, but they don’t come across as false or hackneyed. The film is reminiscent of other strong war films, like Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line, yet it feels original in its approach.

Writer/Director David Ayer makes high-testosterone movies about young men in dangerous situations, like the LA gang film Harsh Times (2005), the intense buddy-cop film End of Watch (2012), and the DEA task force thriller Sabotage (released earlier in 2014).  He also wrote Denzel Washington’s Oscar-winning rogue-cop drama Training Day (2001). A war film about the dynamics of young men cooped up in a tank, blowing Nazis away, seems like excellent fodder for this director. Fury surpasses all of Ayer’s previous work because it’s the least self-aware movie he’s made. Though the film is a technical tour-de-force, Ayer doesn’t draw excessive attention to his filmmaking style nor place portentous, subtextural statements in the mouths of his characters. (Well, maybe he does occasionally, but they’re so simple and Pitt delivers them with such authority and authenticity that they never feel like a clever writer.) 

Fury is also Ayer’s most sophisticated film to date and also his most impressively photographed and edited. The centerpiece of the film, in which a group of tanks capture a small German town, and Pitt and Lerman separate themselves from their celebrating confederates, is profoundly unsettling and oddly satisfying, despite its fatalistic tone. It’s a lengthy sequence, reminiscent of many famous quiet, post-combat scenes in classic war movies, yet we have literally no idea how it will unfold. When it’s over, we’re not entirely sure what to make of it, but that feels entirely appropriate to the experiences of both men. The film’s climactic conclusion is equally unexpected and powerful. This extended finale departs from the you-are-there realism of the rest of the picture and becomes an allegory for the brutality and pessimism of all wars. Yet it is also a celebration of the black-and-white concepts of individual honor and collective sacrifice that most audiences associate with the last “good war.” Like many films about this time in history, Fury romanticizes the heroism of the men who fought WWII and simplifies the good guys vs. bad guys morality of the conflict. But its ability to create a visceral understanding of the specific duties and unspeakable horrors experienced by the men who fought in tanks is unprecedented. Ayer outdoes himself in exploring his signature theme of how incomprehensible violence affects the psyches of men.