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| Pitt and Co. pause on the way to Berlin. |
The heart of David Ayer's Fury
is right in the first shot. It is 1945, with the coup de grâce about to fall on Nazi Germany. A lone figure on
horseback rides out of the mist, looking oddly archaic in what we've been told
is a movie about World War II. The rider turns left, passing a knot of
deserted, burning tanks—until an American GI jumps out and kills him. Then the
American (Brad Pitt) gently untacks the horse and sets it free.
So there it is: Ayer sees these guys in tanks as the
inheritors of knightly chivalry—but also its murderers. There's truth in this
theme, both in how armored soldiers saw themselves and how they (and the
machine gun) ended three thousand years of cavalry dominance on the
battlefields of Europe. There's a bitter sort of beauty in how Ayer envisions
it. Trouble is, he has no idea how to make the rest of Fury as evocative as these first few minutes.
Pitt is Sgt. "War Daddy" Collier, a veteran tank
commander who aptly summarizes the arc of his story by saying "I started
this war killing Germans in Africa. Now I'm killing Germans in Germany."
As portrayed by Pitt, he's exhausted by his war but also savors it, as if he
knows nothing else in his life will compare to it. He's promised the men under
his command (including Shia LaBeouf as a Bible-quoting gunner and Logan Lerman
as a quaking greenhorn) that he will bring them home alive—an absurd but
perhaps necessary lie. His boys even start to believe it, until their "War
Daddy" tells them they must stand alone to defend a strategic crossroads
against an entire German battalion.
Americans have a particular talent for seeing themselves at
the Three Hundred at Thermopylae. We're always the intrepid band of defenders
against the barbaric hordes—even when we're really more like the Persians,
gifted with overwhelming force. Steven Spielberg got away with this conceit in the
final thirty minutes of Saving Private
Ryan, largely because what came before was so magisterial we'd have gone
with him anywhere. Ayer, alas, is no Spielberg. Despite a few inspired moments,
Fury never gathers enough momentum to
blast through the clichés of this genre. Of
course the rookie learns to kill; of
course the guys feel victory in their grasp but their humanity slipping
through their fingers.
Few Hollywood films about World War 2 find themselves in truly
new territory. With the possible exception of the Western, no genre is so
thoroughly picked-over, so challenging to present in a new light. Spielberg,
and to a lesser extent Quentin Tarantino (Inglorious
Basterds) came the closest recently—and they are two of our most naturally
gifted filmmakers. Ayer, whose directorial credits so far include a few
undistinguished cop dramas (Street Kings,
End of Watch) has a way to go to
enter that company. Though Fury makes
a credible run across the battlefield, it still ends up a burning wreck in the
end.
© 2014 Nicholas Nicastro
© 2014 Nicholas Nicastro
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