David Ayer's 'Fury' (second review)

On some levels, it is a film that penetrates the moral corruption and depravity of war, and as such, is a vitally needed antidote to the relentless propaganda about the “heroes” who allegedly protect the homeland (itself a phrase culled from the Nazis) against an ever-morphing and endlessly available enemy. On others, however, it reinstates precisely these clichés, rather in the manner of Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty.

Fury — the title comes from the name bestowed on the Sherman tank crew whose fortunes it follows — is set in April 1945. Allied armies have quartered Germany east and west; Berlin is besieged; there are no longer German armies in the field, but mere battalions sometimes consisting of the children conscripted from the Hitlerjugend, and occasional tanks on the prowl. It’s a mop-up operation, but resistance can come from any quarter, and the Army’s Shermans are no match for the German Tiger. War, even with victory at hand, is still hell.

The irrelevance of ideology

This is a point worth making. It doesn’t matter whether you’re killed on the first day of a war or the last: The mud, misery, and danger are just the same. The American army is unstoppable at this point, but on the grunt level no one is any the better protected against a minefield or a sniper’s ambush. No soldier is a winner, only the army he belongs to, and no one really belongs to anything larger than his immediate unit, in this case the five-man crew of the Fury that has fought under their sergeant, Don “Wardaddy” Collier, since the North African campaign. Survival means bonding and placing one’s faith in the unit leader. For the Fury’s crew, Wardaddy (Brad Pitt) is running the war, not Eisenhower. They will kill for him, and they will die for him. Fascism and democracy are quite beside the point.

This isn’t exactly a new idea, but Fury sharpens it. War’s final absurdity appears only at the moment of victory, when it is revealed to be essentially a mindless yet atavistic mechanism, a juggernaut that simply grinds the fluff of reasons and objectives under its tread until it finally comes to a halt. Wardaddy’s tank is an apt symbol of this, and in the film’s most brutal image — there are many — the tank rolls over a corpse half-buried in the mud of the road, flattening it further into the muck of which its dissolution is already part.

The plot, such as it is, concerns Norman (Logan Lerman), a college-educated Army typist who is pressed into service to replace one of the tank’s fallen gunners. Wardaddy realizes that Norman will endanger the rest of the crew unless he is rapidly bloodied, and he forces him to execute a German prisoner caught wearing an American soldier’s coat. Norman soon becomes an efficient killer, but Wardaddy, who senses in him the humanity he himself has lost, treats him protectively. This causes tensions with the other members of the crew, but they are finally reconciled and won over to him, unit cohesion being the condition of their survival.

A single organism

In what will be their final mission, the tank is sent out to secure a supply crossroads, where, crippled by a mine, it runs into a battalion of Waffen-SS, battle-hardened veterans determined to fight to the last. The position is hopeless, but Wardaddy, announcing that he has never run from a fight, mans the turret, while giving his men permission to save themselves. One by one, however, led by Norman, they return to the tank, unwilling — or unable — to abandon him.

Fury doesn’t ask us to see these men as heroes, although that is how they will appear. We approve, of course, of the men’s decision not to abandon their commander, even as it is clear that he has finally lost the regard for his own life that shelters theirs. Unit survival has been their common cause, but in knitting themselves into a single organism and placing themselves at the disposal of a single mind, they ensure their ultimate suicide. This is how war functions; this is what it boils down to.

In the larger picture, the war’s ultimate horror was the submission of an entire people to the mind of one man, Adolf Hitler. In its last days, his delusional commands no longer affect its action, but it continues as a grim automaton. When one of the crew asks Wardaddy why the Germans continue to fight, he answers simply, “Wouldn’t you?” The war has become its own reason; it is what is there. Rallying his troops to storm the crippled tank, the SS commander cries out, “It’s our land!” This seems to echo Wardaddy’s own explanation, until one reflects that it is precisely the land that is being laid waste to no end but certain defeat.

Modern crusades

My colleague A. J. Sabatini has suggested that Fury rings false in the character of “Bible” (Shia LaBeouf), whose intense religiosity drives him and who finds in the end that Wardaddy, who has mocked his piety, can quote Scripture back to him. This point is well taken. Although religious fanaticism is an underlying current of war — especially of American wars, with their overtly crusader aspect — it is out of character for the profane Wardaddy to invoke Isaiah at the end, and to refer the war to divine purpose. Here, the film is trying to cover all bets at once, a weakness endemic to Hollywood scripts.

We won’t shake our own war habit, the most dangerous narcotic we consume, until we can look it squarely in the face. Perhaps it’s no accident that the longest war in our history, which President Obama has just unilaterally extended again, is for control of a country that provides most of the world’s most addictive opiate.

For A.J. Sabatini’s review of Fury, click here.