Fury

I don't know what to think about Fury. It's David Ayer's leap into "the depravity" of war that has me talking to myself. 

I'd seen this movie before, every part of it. The lifelessness, the vulgarity, the churlish war-tattered soldiers, the bodies exploding and imploding and being devoured by artillery, the less Band of Brothers version of American men and more the version of American men acting like pissed off teenagers; all this I had seen. I've seen Brad Pitt play this role before. I've seen other actors do just as well with the hallmark roles played by these more than sufficient actors. There are three things that stuck out to me about this one, though: 

The meal. The filming in a tank. And Shia Labeouf. 

Maybe I'd seen em' before but I'm still thinking about em'--it's these three things. And that's something. 

Pitt, 'Wardaddy' heads up the crew of a Sherman tank in the spring of 1945. Hitler's all-out attack is underway. Every able bodied German has been called to defend the motherland. SS officers and destroyed European towns abound. Filmmakers need these things in a WWII film--an ultimate bad guy. These characters are forced to negotiate the moral terrain of humans at their worst. Tough circumstances. 

His crew includes Bible (Labeouf), the Mexican-American, the Southern brute, and the new guy that was trained to type. Props to Ayers for taking archetypal characters and keeping it interesting. Camaraderie is sought by so many directors and actors. It's rarely achieved because most times it's too clean, too polished. Ayers allows just enough grime to slip in. After all, groups of guys are mostly un-interesting in the real world. They are actually quite annoying and borish. They rarely say things that would be found in a movie script. They are normally neither clever nor well-spoken. Ayers allows for enough of the real-life depravity of a group of guys to sneak in; the insults are unpolished and a little more cutting and back-handed; just like my friends from home. 

These five men are on their way to the end of the line. They are going to be put in situations where it's like Sparta vs. the Persians and all that. Only heroism will endure. Maybe the new guy will make it out. All of that. Again, nothing new here. Again, props to Ayers for not running from this. He's kind of let Saving Private Ryan and hundreds of other war films do the work for him, one could even throw in some westerns and East Asian revenge thrillers as sources of influence. I'm thinking of Platoon meets Chan Woo Park meets I Saw the Devil with a little bit of Apocalypse Now. That's quite a spectrum but Ayers, in all his machoism says, "Yeah. I've seen those movies. I liked them. And yeah. I made Training Day. So what? I like archetypes and I'll use them. Anecdotal? Fuck it. Gets me where I want to go." 

And Ayers wants to go somewhere. He took me somewhere.  He took me out of wanting to rank his battle scenes on some blogger list of best battle scenes. He took me into a world most of us don't know about. Most of us that go to theaters don't know what was happening during the dinner scene. I have some questions and some thoughts about it. 

Pitt, after a battle scene that could be ranked high on a blogger list of best battle scenes, takes the newbie for round two of indoctrination--into an apartment enlivened by the unnerving anxiety of two German women. Earlier, round one of indoctrination involved the normal bullying, gang sociology type stuff. This scene, as they entered the apartment, was something else. I was really freaking uncomfortable. I couldn't tell if something brilliant was happening or not. 

Part of my hesitance was because of the un-needed hokey elements that kept peppering the early parts of the movie. There was no need for the newbie to play classical music on an out-of-tune piano while his newly warded German lady-friend sang over his shoulder. Just leave that stuff out. But then there were moments of real heft. When Pitt, taking reprieve from the party just outside the apartment, shaving and wanting to eat some eggs with hot tea, took over the screen and had that old school movie star presence. Then, I was like, "Whoa. Something is happening here." I forgot about the battle scenes. I was like, "This is weird, in a good way." 

Wesley Morris of the Boston Globe/Grantland describes it this way:

"A vanquished German town provides the setting for an extended interlude in which Don takes Norman into an apartment still occupied by a mother and daughter (beautifully acted by Anamaria Marinca and Alicia von Rittberg). As American soldiers drink and loot and party in the square outside the building, Don tries to steal for himself some civility: a shave, a meal, maybe the touch of a woman. Don forces Norman to head into a bedroom with the daughter, who somehow manages to shed her reluctance.

This sequence is almost the only reason to have Pitt in this movie. He barely seems to talk (Don does speak German), but the authority of his presence dominates the apartment. The other three characters take their orders from Don’s silence, his eyes. This is a passage that could have transformed the film — darkened it, opened it outward. But once the other men of the Fury intrude — drunk, belligerent, jealous that Don brought Norman upstairs for sex and not one of them — Ayer’s script doesn’t know where to go with this disrupted oasis, so he obliterates it. That sequence is confusing. The arriving men menace the frightened women and tell a sloshed, bitter story that’s meant to get at the war’s horror. But the moment doesn’t explicate the soul of the movie as does the digressive rubber plantation dinner sequence Francis Ford Coppola added to Apocalypse Now or provide comedy and then unbearable suspense as the beer hall sequence does inInglourious Basterds. Maybe Ayer thinks it does, but he’s straining for meaningfulness."

On the real, I can't decide if I agree with Morris or not. At the moment of viewing I entirely agreed with him. The hokey parts were still fresh in my mind. Now, a couple days removed, the hokey is less clear. The freshness of an 'interlude' of depravity in a war flick; that part of it all is still with me. And I'm wondering if Ayer's is getting close to something that Apocalypse Now and Platoon and some Jodorowsky nudged towards--humans can be really despicable and what's more, we are capable of empathizing with the most despicable. It was Labeouf that evoked the empathy. 

Supposedly he did some method-acting stuff and would really cut himself with a real knife and wouldn't shower and all that. Respect. I had been feeling down about all his arrests and stuff. His recent visits to Ellen and Jimmy Kimmel kind of bummed me out. The only outlet for a movie star are those really well-lit couches and Malibu rehab centers. That sucks. And then they show back up on a movie screen in my local theater. They act. They evoke. And they make something happen. Labeouf in this movie was just really good at that whole thing. His acting in this movie is worth the time and money. He has an ability that few others have, in my opinion. Maybe it's ruining his life. I don't know about that. I don't know him. But he did something special in this movie and special doesn't happen all that often. It certainly happens less than TMZ worthy posts do. I hope that's a good thing. 

Lastly, Ayers filmed most of a movie from the inside of a Sherman tank. That's probably hard to do. He did really well with it. The angles and action in a small space added to the presence of actors pursing that gnarly space where ideologies, historical events, and modern day interpretations all come together. Movies, ones that are shot well, are cool things capable of altering how our synapses and memories work together to alter our own ideologies. Accomplishing all of this inside of Sherman take is an accomplishment worth noting. 

I still don't know what to think about Fury. I'm not sure it's a great film or anything like that. But it's got me thinking and that's something.