Pitt goes to war in Fury.
Fury soldiers fight battle of morality
The horror. The horror: You can’t have a credible war movie without conjuring a little bit of Marlon Brando’s ghost as Col. Kurtz uttering the dark heart of human truth.
We are beasts. And in the perpetual apocalypse that is now, accessing the monster within seems to get easier, and more socially acceptable. Witness the moral carnage that is the Kardashians, or the ambient blood and gore on cable television, and the once black and white line between ordinary decency and the grotesquely depraved goes all grey.
Yet we still exhibit a hopeful desire to recalibrate the moral GPS because a movie such as Fury is asking tougher questions than its marketing poster with Brad Pitt in army fatigues might suggest.
A Second World War movie that begins in the final weeks of combat in Europe, Fury introduces us to an intrepid — if somewhat scurrilous — crew of soldiers in a Sherman tank they nickname Fury.
They are headed by Wardaddy (Pitt), a scarred survivor who promised he would do his best to keep his boys alive. They are grateful for his skills in battle, but their respect is tainted by fear, because Wardaddy has a darker side — and so do they.
The only innocent is Norman (Logan Lerman), a kid plucked from the steno pool to become a gunner. At first he just doesn’t have the stomach for it. He resists when Wardaddy asks him to open fire and shoot other humans.
But eventually, in the scorching, blood-soaked heat of combat, he warps. And it’s here, in this internal war zone, that most of David Ayer’s movie is stationed.
Opting for a cross between long, moody quiet moments and a clear desire to be a tank version of Das Boot, Ayer keeps his drama contained inside the tank so he can maximize the personal dynamics and show us the different shades of moral grey.
In the same stroke, he essentially removes the external enemy. Unlike those early movies that taught an entire postwar generation how to hero-talk like John Wayne and fight like Jimmy Cagney, Fury does not feature scenes with screaming, unrepentant German officers assuring us of their evil.
It shows us soldiers struggling to deal with the reality of war, which is killing others, and watching your own die around you.
We have to feel this horror in our guts, so Norman is assigned the role of audience touchstone and gives us a righteous platform to keep our feet out of the mud. But his slide is inevitable, and provides the secondary stage of Ayer’s movie as the tank burrows ever deeper into German territory, and ever deeper into the dark heart of Fury’s occupants.
Pitt’s natural ability to look heroic gives the film added drama because we assume he’s good. And he is good because he’s fighting for the “right side” of history and he wears a U.S. uniform. But these are external measures.
Ayer wants us to get to the next level. He wants us to question the whole notion of nobility in war because just about everything the men do is unspeakable, and completely unredeemable. Ayer sends his message loud and clear when he reveals a war-induced bout of animal cruelty. Heroes are not supposed to shoot horses, are they? Yet here we are, stuck in a big can with guys who are both good and evil at the same time.
Ayer seems to have a knack for these kinds of characters. As the screenwriter behind The Fast and the Furious as well as Training Day, he understands how to exploit Hollywood expectation for his own ends. But Fury doesn’t fire on every cylinder. It drags and sometimes feels shapeless and there’s a whole lot of Bible talk that’s supposed to nod to our current reality, and the ridiculous idea that God could be on anyone’s side in war. But for the most part this dialogue is empty and feels random — like getting a Bible lesson from someone who never read the Bible.
But that could be the point: The boys in the sardine can are making it up as they go along, trying to stay alive another day, knowing the road back to redemption may be a bridge too far.